Wii U Sales : Will Nintendo Have to Suspend Production?

[Mythmaker1]

Bruxel said:
nintendo has a ton of money in the bank.

if the sales continue to be super sluggish this is what will happen:
-Price cut
-Get tons of games out
-Market them like crazy
-what?
-Profit

I predict this is the 3ds experince all over again.

 

Yes, they have plenty of money. But their prestige is on the line, and Iwata has basically put his position on the line to guarentee a certain profitability. It's not as simple as just absorbing the losses.

If they issue a price cut, they'll lose a lot of face, since they publically stated there wasn't one in the forseeable future. The games are coming, but history has shown that games alone do not cause long-term sales growth. Marketing has been a disaster from the start.

 

the2real4mafol said:
this ain't going the way of the dreamcast, not with the investments they have made with Wii U when they have yet to release a Mario Kart, 3D Mario game, super smash bros or even a legend of zelda or any other key Nintendo titles

Suspending production is not the same thing as discontinuing. It'd mean they would shut down their production until their excess had been sold, then resuming. True, the Dreamcast was suspended, then discontinued, but the Gamecube was suspended, then continued. It's good business, but really bad press.

 

Otakumegane said:
They did that during Winter 2001? For the GC didn't they?

2003, I believe. Their shipment numbers for the first half of the year were, frankly, catastrophic.

 

Screamapillar said:

Nintendo knows how to run their business. As such, I don't think they're going to find themselves in a situation where they have to do something related to hardware production volume that they didn't think they'd have to do. 

In other words, they know a lot more about all the various complexities of their own hardware production and all of that than we do, and they're not going to be caught off guard. They've been doing this since the early 1980's.

 

It's happened before. They had to suspend Gamecube production (temporarily, I believe) less than two years after launch. Granted, the sales slump then was far, far worse than now, but it did happen.