We've all seen the sales by now. Europe seems to have not taken a liking to Nintendo's new consoles. The 3DS is selling worse there than in any of the other major markets and Wii U isn't doing too hot either. Here are the sales:

Europe Hardware by Platform

These numbers are quite a bit lower than North America's and Japan's.

Why is this? What Can Nintendo do to change this up? Will Nintendo become popular again in Europe this generation?

Europe market is lead by Sony. They are used to HD gaming and people see no point in switching to the Wii U when they have a PS3 or 360. The US however is a lot more casual-driven so stuff like Kinect and Wii are easier to push to market.

I know people will disagree, but: tablet PCs and smartphones.

Was Nintendo ever big in Europe? Europe's market is supposedly bigger than Japan's yet Nintendo has always thrived in the US and Japan with Europe at third in sales usually with the exception of the wii and ds which are, no coincidence, nintendos biggest sellers ever.

Isn't the economy still pretty crap there, too?

Well I can't speak for the 3ds but where im from the WiiU is like a ghost, I've seen one ad for it and the local video store had next to no signage out for it. The front windows all covered in LBP karting pics and Wonderbook. But im from a small country so might be different in other EU territories.

Even if it's a PS3 market those numbers are still way too low.

It all comes down to marketing.

If Europe is a hard-core audience, then the marketing should have been blasting ZombiU and the hard-core ports.

I've heard over & over from European gamers they haven't even seen a Wii U Ad.

It's such a baffling mystery. Only thing I can think of is sales globally have been o.k., they haven't needed to turn the marketing machine on. Now I assume they will, and the consoles shipped will be pre-installed with the big Day-1 patch, so they avoid that problem.

I'm guessing it's calculated somehow.

Even if we say that Nintendo was never big in Europe those numbers are still too low.

Nintendo is obviously not doing something right here.

Nintendo of Europe should be burnt and restructurated from the groundup. They need more driven force and liberty.

Mostly two reasons:

1) It's the most expensive gaming hardware at the moment.

2) The economy is hitting them pretty badly so it goes to the first point, people will buy a cheaper console with more games.