FORTUNE: The game isn't over yet for Nintendo's Wii U

[Soundwave]

curl-6 said:

Soundwave said:

curl-6 said:
Of course its not over yet. It's still too expensive for much of its target audience, and Smash Bros isn't out yet.
If the latter arrives in time for Black Friday, it should do quite well this holiday season.

Define "quite well". If by "quite well" you mean a distant third place and sub-GameCube level sales, sure it'll do "quite well". It did "quite well" last holiday season too. Even saying YoY sales are better well pretty much every console has better sales its third holiday season over its second, so that's some special attribute that applies only to the Wii U (not that it's really that difficult to improve on such low sales to begin with). 

Distant third is by no means guaranteed at this point.

It's gaurunteed. It won't match GameCube sales, so unless Microsoft starts shipping each XB1 with cancer, they will comfortably beat it in the end even if the X1 only sells 30% of what the XBox 360 did. 

If Mario Kart cannot generate extended momentum for a console, then really the truth is they are beyond screwed here. You should be seeing a much stronger response from the market to games like MK8 and 3D World if there was going to be an actual turnaround here. Not just a one month bump to above 100k.

To be honest the first XBox probably would've beat the GameCube by a pretty sizable gap too, it should've hit about 30 million LTD (versus 22 mill for GameCube) but MS yanked it from storeshelves because they were taking too much of a manufacturing loss/unit because of a poor deal they signed with Nvidia and opted to focus on the 360 launch.