Nintendo's Wii U sales struggle
Exclusives are coming, but is it already too late? Eurogamer investigates.
This week Nintendo will release its crucial third-quarter sales results and reveal how Wii U fared during its initial two months on sale. The company had promised to ship 5.5 million Wii U consoles by the end of March and end the financial year back in the black, thus avoiding a repeat of last year's damaging loss - the first in the company's history.
The loss was described as a blip that occurred as Nintendo price-dropped the 3DS and wrapped up costly research and design on the Wii U. It was a cost the company would not repeat, Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata told investors. But profits for this year have already been revised down. In October, Nintendo forecasted a new, slimmer earnings margin for the year, with the Wii U's early success playing a critical part. It's this early performance that we can now try to evaluate, with the console launched and already past its first holiday sales season.
Nintendo UK has remained silent about Wii U sales, but MCV reported first-weekend results of 40,000 consoles. It's a modest sum compared to other launches constrained by the level of stock allocated to the UK, although what did filter through to shop shelves didn't entirely sell out.
Eurogamer has been told by UK numbers firm Chart-Track that, after five weeks on sale, the Wii U's initial sales figure counted for 50.1 per cent of the system's total. This indicates that Wii U sales in the UK were at the 80,000 units mark at the beginning of January. It's a huge drop-off in sales momentum after the console's initial weekend on sale, but one that is typical of other UK hardware launches: pre-orders and pent up customer demand will always make for a huge first week and, by comparison, first-week sales for the original Wii counted for 50.4 per cent of its sales total after the same five-week period. For Xbox 360 it was 54.6 per cent, and for PlayStation 3 it was 71.7 per cent.
Wii U numbers as a whole are far less than other recent home console launches. We know that PlayStation 3 sold 165,000 units over its opening weekend in the UK, so another 29.3 per cent of sales would count for 48,345 units - pushing its five-week total to 208,000. Xbox 360 sold 70,000 in its opening weekend, so therefore sold 101,000 over five weeks. Finally, the Wii sold 105,000 units in its opening weekend, meaning in five weeks it had sold over 210,000. This leaves the Wii U, in the UK at least, lagging some way behind. But it's important to note that launch sales are just that. In the UK the PS3 outsold Xbox 360 by 2:1 at launch, but Microsoft's console has ended up selling significantly more than Sony's over its lifetime on these shores.
In terms of money made, it took four weeks for the Wii U to earn £18 million - the amount that the original Wii made in its launch week. That's despite all three Wii U launch bundles costing more, with the most popular Premium bundle priced at least £100 higher per unit.
Software attachment ratios also drive home the fact that, since launch, Wii U has commanded a far lower user base than other recent home console launches. The number of games bought by Wii U owners has grown at almost exactly the same rate as those snapped up by early Xbox 360, Wii and PS3 audiences. But the lack of software in recent UK charts points to the fact that this ratio is being applied to a far smaller user base. Three weeks after Wii U launched there was one exclusive game remaining in the top 40 (the pack-in game Nintendo Land, in 39th). Since then there have been none. After the equivalent amount of time following the Wii's launch, it had two games in the top 10 (Wario Ware: Smooth Moves and Wii Play, with Zelda: Twilight Princess a little further down the chart).
Outside of the UK, Nintendo's French office is the only other one to divulge sales figures so far in Europe. It reported that 118,000 units had been shifted by the end of 2012, around one and a half times the UK's total.
The most recent North American data shows that Wii U had sold nearly 890,000 units by 29th December, less than the Wii in the same time frame, but making more money due to the aforementioned difference in launch pricing. GameStop, which owns 6700 stores across North America, Europe and Australia, described the launch as "successful", and indicated it had shifted 320,000 consoles in the run up to Christmas - a number that equates to about 48 consoles sold per store.
In Japan, Wii U had sold 791,000 units by 20th January, numbers company Media-Create reported. Cumulative Japanese sales place it firmly in the middle-ground of recent console releases - above the launch sales trajectories of the PS3, PSP, Vita and GameCube, but below that of other Nintendo hardware such as the 3DS, DS, Wii, and also the PlayStation 2.
The last few weeks since Christmas have shown a worrying downward trend, however. Initially it seemed that sales in Japan had stabilised at around 65,000 per week. But the last two weeks have seen figures plummet post-New Year to around 20,000 and then 16,000. Last week, Wii U's seventh on sale in Japan, the console sold less than the struggling PlayStation Vita did at the same point in its life. News that the Wii U is fighting to maintain momentum in Nintendo's heartland asks questions as to the console's post-holiday legs worldwide.
Tot up sales for the UK, France, North America and Japan and you get a total of around 1.85 million units, albeit with data missing for much of the PAL region and North America since New Year. How many more sales would the rest of Europe contribute to this total? Not many, according to Piers Harding-Rolls, senior analyst and games boss at UK-based IHS Screen Digest.
"We would describe performance in both US and Japan as OK, with Europe considerably behind the level of these other territories," he told Eurogamer. "Judging by the disparity of performance it is clear that Nintendo concentrated its sales efforts on the US and Japan.
"Overall the platform did not hit our forecasts in any of its major sales territories," he continued. "We expected there to be more significant pent-up demand from Wii evangelists in this opening sales period. Based on current sales performance we believe Nintendo's guidance of 5.5 million Wii U shipments by end of March now looks aggressive."
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