OK, I faced it: WiiU can't sell over 15M

[wangjingwanjia]

zorg1000 said:

wangjingwanjia said:
I absolutely think that the Wii U will pass 15 lifetime, no doubt in my mind. But to make a guess for an actual lifetime sale I can not, it's really difficult to know how much it will sell in the end.

I usually say 30-40m, but to say 20-30m would be much more safe.

The GC and N64 that didn't sell all too well still made 4-6m lifetime in Japan so my bet is that the Wii U will do the same. It is already at 2m with a 1m/year average, similar to the two other systems.

When it comes to NA it would need to continue selling around its current numbers to reach 10-14, similar to the GC.

For EU the GC and N64 made 4-6 like in Japan, extremely low numbers actually. And just looking at the Wii U's numbers it seems to do worse than the other two, but not too worse, so it could make the same numbers.

For RoW I would think 1-2m would seem possible.

Add those numbers up and I will get 19-27m consoles WW lifetime sales.

Still I'm hoping for pricecuts and some wind in the sails for Nintendo. If things goes better in the coming years it could reach 40m, which for me would be a victory in itself, given the poor situation it has now. But yes, this is wishful thinking.

So can it make 15? Yes it will. Make 20? I do think so, yes. Make 30? Perhaps, it's not impossible but also not probable. Make 40? Seems impossible at the moment, something must really change for it to happen.

Does anyone have any numbers for how well(poorly) the GC, N64, Saturn and DC actually did in their 3 first years on the market? It would be really interesting to see. :)

Ur actually wrong on a few things here. Wii U is tracking behind GC by a pretty large margin in every territory.

In terms of shipments, Wii U was at 7.29 million at the end of Sept, in the same time frame GC was at 10.45 million. Wii U is down over 3 million and the gap is getting larger. GC shipped a further 3.5 million for a total of 13.95 million at the end of its 2nd full year.

Wii U shipped 1.95 million last holiday and this year's sales are pretty similar so we should expect similar shipments, let's just say 2.2 million. That would put Wii U around 9.5 million compared to about 14 million for GC. Down 35% compared to GC thru 2nd full year, if it continues to be down by 35% then Wii U will only sell about 14-15 million.

Also N64 was at 23 million by Mar 1999 (2.5 years on market) so Wii U is tracking less than half as well as N64 which again would put Wii U less than 15 million lifetime.

If the numbers you have are indeed right then I can understand why people think that the Wii U might not even make it to the 15 millions mark.

When I did my brief calculation I simply looked at what N64/GC had sold lifetime and compared it to what Wii U had sold now, and used those numbers as the base, so I used a 4m/year average. Of course the sales goes up and down, especially in the beginning where as they rise and then decline at the end, so 4m in their second year is nothing to cheer about at all.  

Where did you find your numbers anyway? I would love to dig into some old numbers too, especially for the GC since Wii U seems to be heading down the same old road.