So we're coming up to the end of July and it's been a horridly quiet year for retail releases on Wii U. I'm in Australia and we've had seven games in seven months. (I've put games published by Nintendo in bold.)
- The Lego Movie Videogame
- Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze
- Lego The Hobbit
- Mario Kart 8
- How to Train Your Dragon 2
- One Piece: Unlimited World Red
- Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark
Looking ahead, I count another 12 games that are planned for retail release in 2014.
- Hyrule Warriors
- Disney Infinity: Marvel Super Heroes
- Bayonetta 2
- Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures 2
- Skylanders: Trap Team
- Just Dance 2015
- Sonic Boom
- Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham
- Watch Dogs
- Super Smash Bros. for Wii U
- NES Remix Collection
- Wii Sports Club
So that's 19 retail games (8 Nintendo published) for an entire calendar year. Let's compare that to the number of releases in the third calendar year of previous Nintendo consoles.
N64: 63 (9 Nintendo published)
Gamecube: 112 (12 Nintendo published)
Wii: 243 (7 Nintendo published)
Wii U: 19 (8 Nintendo published)
To put this in context, none of the three previous consoles ever released fewer than 50 retail games in a calendar year prior to the release of their successor. By my count, Wii U had 27 retail games in 2012, 45 in 2013 and just 19 this year.
Don't know if anyone is interested in these numbers, but I thought I'd share all the same! Might go a little way to explain why Nintendo's finances are in severe decline.
