tak13 said:
There is a new rumour, which claims that nintendo is restricting wii u supply, to avoid unsold inventory... Some people have the tendency to take rumors as facts. Personally, I was always thinking that they don't replenish the shelves with wii u units sufficiently on purpose, but because they want to move the demand to pokken tournament wii u bundle which arrives on the 18th of March, anywise stock problems are expected... Sales in Japan exceeded in a great extend Nintendo's expectations, due to splatoon and super mario maker, which caused a relatively outstanding holiday perfomance, similar to 2013 which was wii u best year, with killer deals/offers, and outdid 2014 by approximately double numbers, with pricey splatoon and super mario maker bundles. So manufactured wii u stock was nearly depleted, something that Nintendo wasn't anticipating... Probably, Nintendo was considering that what they sold in a year, it would be sold between two years. p.s I have put paragraphs but my post appears like a wall of text, WTF! |
There's also a rumour flying around that Nintendo stopped ordering the custom chips for the Wii-U after the 2014 holiday season. I would not be surprised if the lack of inventory is because Nintendo quit manufacturing Wii-U consoles completely at the same time as they had too many in stock unsold. Like the Microsoft Surface RT (the product that cost Steve Ballmer his job) they've probably got millions stashed in warehouses, virtually unsellable due to competition from the others in the market. Like the RT, nobody will buy a system with less software than the alternatives and costs the same or more (in many UK shops you can find the Xbox One selling for less now), even if the brand name on it is appealing (Microsoft still holds higher brand value in small business than Apple or Google).
I think what is most telling about the situation though is the graph comparing software sales to hardware. The red line for GameCube is higher above the blue line for hardware, while the inverse is true for Wii-U. This suggests less software is been bought by users of Wii-U, which in itself suggests that many of the systems sold are not in active use after a few months of ownership. They could either have been sold, traded in, or left in a cupboard to gather dust.
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