The thing is only dumb people blindly buy a console. And a Nintendo console with no real Nintendo game doesnt sell. (NSMB is more like a 10 dollar eshop title rehashed sound design models etc. it still feels less fresh than SMB3.... and is way to easy.)

Mario Kart 3d Mario Zelda etc. thats missing.


Btw. The commercial is shit. its like 20 seconds of stupid people acting all weird with "Wii-moters" trying to peep on the gamepad and  a "NINTENDO WIIU THE NEW CONSOLE WITH THE TABLET IS HERE!" slogal...   And all the fast camera movements and cuts dont help either you dont even really see whats happening on the TV etc. Its just a hectic mess

I think Mario kart will come to Nintendo's rescue in Europe and really kickstart sales of the Wii u, when it finally arrives. I think Nintendo's problems in Europe are probably a combination of many things, most mentioned in this thread. Not having any dedicated company structure through whole swathes of the area doesn't help. It has been this way since the N64. At the time, the whole European operation went through Nintendo Germany, as they shut down the U.K. office. There has always been a suspicion Nintendo didn't care too much for Europe and i think the success of the Wii there sort of took the big N by surprise. Although they should have capitalised on that, they didn't and Nintendo Europe is still run exactly the same way afaik.

Another failure of Nintendo in Europe imo is the failure, through lack of advertising or whatever, is to get the Wii u out there, in the public's perception. I mean, i've had two people visit in the last month or so that didn't even know what the Wii u was. They never had that prob with the Wii. The world and his wife knew what that was.

Having said that, though Nintendoland is amazing and will probably sell many consoles through word of mouth; it will probably take a while for the "brush fire" effect to really make a difference though.

Crysis, and not only: we are smart and we troll Ninty before Ninty troll us (like Reggie does with Americans).

That's a low blow.. I could say the same about america and the PS3 :P

Problem is you may be 6th in Europe but that doesn't exactly translate to big console sales, here in the UK we have a large population of people who migrated here from Eastern European countries like Poland so I'm wondering how much of that 40m are actually still in Poland because a lot of Eastern Europeans work abroad in other countries. As I mentioned before that region of Europe is also very hardcore PC orientated so the is a fair chance that even with being 6th you'll get much lower console sales while something like Steam must be booming over there, your growth maybe fast but it may not be big enough for it to register against the bigger countries. Nintendo aren't handling the smaller EU countries with the best care yes but I think that's due to the smaller countries not really being on their minds or them ever really being into Nintendo to begin with, I don't know how previous Nintendo consoles have performed there so I don't know.

NOE are based only in one Country in the whole of the EU with a partial office being in the UK so I'd imagine they have a harder job operating then NOA and NCL who have far less regions to deal with around their base.

Heh, I know. I think around 2 mil people left Poland to the UK, Ireland and Germany recently. Huge blow, but we still are in the same place on the list. PC gaming is truely a problem for console manufacturers, because it's just so much cheaper. When a console game is released in Poland it costs 179, 199 or 219 Złoty. The PC version of the same game costs 79, 99 or 129 Złoty. That is a huge difference, especially since in the recent years technology hasn't been advancing at a particularly big pace, so you can get a gaming PC that's better than a console cheap enough to get get ahead financially after a purchase of just a few games. And like you said, CS is our national game. Almost like Starcraft in Korea ;)

Still. Like I said, the ultimate argument for me is that Sony and MS seem to like what they get from this market, their support is getting better and better every year, they hold Game Days, etc. I see more and more people get into consoles, they are really becoming mainstream and are no longer perceived as toys. I'm sure that if Nintendo honestly tried, they would profit as well. Especially since NES (well, a copy of NES called Pegasus) was the biggest console ever here. Bigger than PC gaming. Everyone had it, everyone was raised on that console, so every boy and girl here knows Mario. You can go ahead and ask any Pole in England about the Pegasus, everyone 22+ will have played it, most younger people as well.

Yes here each system has equal space in shops.

I gotta agree with scisca here! Nintendo isn't really doing a good job in expanding their market in new regions. They better shape up!

Maybe we don't want to.