Wii U to rule in Japan: yay!

[benji232]

Mummelmann said:

benji232 said:

Mummelmann said:
A holiday boost, no competition and numbers still below Gamecube levels for christmas equals ruling Japan now? I think this is a very premature statement. That said; I'd be surprised if any home console manages more than 12-15 million in Japan this gen.

Right.

GameCube, 2002:
Week 49, 39,849
Week 50, 44,902
Week 51, 66,410
Week 52, 60,290

Wii U, 2013:
Week 49, 46,773
Week 50, 72,982
Week 51, 119,159

Right. Have you seen the 2003 numbers for GC in Japan for this week? Week 51 was 129k as I recall, these numbers are not overly impressive, especially with no competition. The Wii U is still behind the GC in Japan at this point, GC sold about 1.040.000 units in 2003 in Japan, Wii U still has a ways to go to sell over one million in one year here.

"still below Gamecube levels for christmas" really nothing in there about "christmas 2002", is there? Or christmas 2004 for that matter, which was pretty bad. You might think that it's unfair to compare the GC's best holiday with the Wii U's worst (for now) but then again; the Wii U has no competition, the GC already had the PS2 to battle at this point and still managed a pretty good holiday in 2003, even in the West. There's no way to tell whether next holiday will be better or worse with some actual competition, so it is also way too soon to be calling the Wii U the victor in Japan.

People are so hung up on shooting down One and PS4 predictions based on launch hype (and rightly so) and saying that there is no proper data to draw any conclusion from, but make ridiculous claims like the OP at the same time, it's equally silly since we actually don't have any valid data to go by for now. If the Wii U outsells the PS4 weekly through 2014 after the PS4's launch and then beats it during holidays 2014, then we can start making these claims.

I mean, honestly; are you impressed with what the Wii U has accomplished with its one year head start?

I never agreed with the OP. And I'm not buying that *no competition* excuse. Nintendo and Sony are aiming for two very different audiences in Japan. I don't think PS4 would have affected sales of the wiiU by a lot. 

With that said, wiiU had a horrible first full year on the market in Japan (and worldwide). However, the system has been showing that it's been having a lot of momentum on it's side ever since the launch of wii party U bundle. I believe the wiiU will have a baseline of around 20k in Japan in 2014 which would be decent enough all things considered. I just can't see the system going back to that 3k baseline.