| Fusioncode said: That is current sales. The WiiU has done 600k in Japan this year. Who cares about one week when the Wii was selling nearly 5 times that of the WiiU during 2008. The fact that the two systems had similar sales for one week proves absolutely nothing. |
It doesn't "prove absolutely nothing". It demonstrates that the situation now is NOT the same as it was through the year. In late October, the Wii U sold about 3k in a week. This is a demonstration of why the Wii U has only done 600k in Japan this year. On the other hand, since the end of October, the fewest Wii Us sold in a single week in Japan were 16k. At that pace alone, the Wii U would have sold 720k through the year. But that's the LOWEST within the period we're talking about. In the month of November, the Wii U sold 80k, which equates to 960k for the year if taken as representative.
And if you look at Japanese Wii sales patterns, you'll see that in both 2007 and 2008, the Wii sold worst in August-November, by comparison with other months. In 2007, in Japan, the Wii sold 160k in November; for the whole year, it sold about 3.68 million units. If we scale to Wii U in November, this would equate to 1.84 million.
If we instead use 2008, the Wii sold about 139.5k in November, and about 3 million for the year. Scaling to Wii U's November, that's about 1.72 million.
So on the basis of recent Wii U sales numbers in Japan, you'd expect a full year's sales to be somewhere in the vicinity of 1.8 million... this won't happen this year, since prior to November the Wii U was struggling badly in Japan, but it does demonstrate that the Wii U isn't doing too badly in Japan NOW.
The Wii U's fortunes in Japan changed at the beginning of November. Any person capable of understanding basic logic can see that. The question now is, will its fortunes hold, improve further, or start to diminish. Based on numbers so far, it looks like it's improving.
EDIT: Here's another way to see my point about Wii U not doing as badly in Japan. Ratio of Wii U to 3DS sales in America: 0.227. Ratio of Wii U to 3DS sales in Europe: 0.116. Ratio of Wii U to 3DS sales in Japan: 0.386. Wii U is doing better in Japan than elsewhere, proportional to the Nintendo handheld.
Same reasoning, applied to Wii U vs total handheld sales (3DS, DS, PSV, PSP) in America: 0.202. In Europe: 0.093. In Japan: 0.308.
Let's try it with PS3+360+WiiU. In America: 0.828. In Europe: 0.46. In Japan: 0.455. Even looking across all of the active consoles in Japan (and the same consoles in other countries), home consoles aren't doing noticeably worse in Japan than in Europe, and while they're doing better in America, that's mostly because Americans don't tend to do handheld gaming as much in general.
