WiiU flop confirmed.

Well Bowser's Inside Story did almost equally as bad.  However Super Paper Mario on the Wii debuted at number 3 back in 2007.  It also moved up to number 1 in its second week.

Is it just me or have people forgotten that theres an added benefit for customers who buy things on the Eshop. Why would there be a lot of sales for games when people are encouraged to buy them on the Eshop. All the hardcore gamers obviously would have bought the premium console as everyone knows that's the better deal, and hardcore are the ZombiU people and other third party game people. NPD doesn't track the Eshop now does it? In fact I think Nintendo has taken its first step to making this entire website irrelevant for Nintendo.

Well in the UK the hardcore could buy a ZombiU bundle which is factored into these numbers.  Also the silly time restrictions on the eshop in Europe for mature content probably isn't helping sales for those games.  We also haven't seen a substantial boost for a game like Black Ops 2 which isn't available on the eshop.

Beyond that, consoles haven't shown that downloadable versions make a significant amount of sales.  This is likely to be exacerbated with the Wii U due to the low default storage and the other issues with their online system such as IDs being tied to the console.

I expect WiiU to sell about 100k in Europe due to supplies. So this sounds bout right.

The article clearly states that WiiU are in "plentiful" supply.

No service is tracking any digital content yet (at least that I know of).

How are they encouraged to buy the games on the eshop ? Are they cheaper than on retail ?
I can't imagine that in the UK since they always have the best deals across Europe. I especially can't imagine it for the US because it was Black Friday and the deals there are usually amazing and everyone living there knows that.

Then you need to factor in that both WiiU consoles have very sparse HDD space. Sure you can buy an external harddrive or use an existing external harddrive but c'mon how many people are doing that and especially doing that from day/week one ? A few percent maybe. Certainly not half the WiiU owners or anything near that.
I mean it would be possible on the 32GB version, but even then you couldn't fit that many games on it and don't forget that not everybody has their console/s connected to the internet and so on.

No matter how you look at it, digital sales of full priced games just can't be anywhere near retail sales at the moment.

I haven't heard anyone saying that the console was at one point supply constraint in Europe. Especially not in the second week.

Also they are a professional tracking service that covers about 90% of the market AFAIK. So they have good relations to all retailers and they likely just needed to ask to come to this conclusion.
They surely didn't walk into one store to make such a claim.

You can seriously believe that Nintendo can't ship enough, can you?

They expect to ship another 4m or so within the next 3 months.