for the fiscal year which is March to March.
3.45m WiiUs shipped in FY1
2.8m in FY2 means 6.25m shipped by end of March. Realistically WiiU can sell about 700k more units in Q1 (Nintendo's Q4) to hit their target with 250k left on shelves.

So not really a sign for over or undertracking.

You are talking 20 years ago. You are acting like this is the successer to SNES. You have to use recent consoles and trends. It's like saying windows 98 was doing great because of x reason and aren't doing great now because they aren't doing x. Trends in business don't stay the same for 20 years.

Plus your argument is highly flawed. The jump from 8 bit to 16 bit is way bigger than ps4 to Wiiu. N64 made nintendo and lose money but was recovered by gameboy sales. I love how you didn't bring up GameCube which was deemed a bigger failure but was way stronger than ps2. Wii was a success because they finally marketed towards there market instead of focusing on hardcore. They reason they screwed up big was trying to do both. The problem is you can't do both. They was no reason to even do both. Wii best saying games were casual and pick up & play games. The gamepad was step backwards. What you are suggesting was they do the opposite of what made them successful and go back to failure plan. Both what you are suggesting and what nintendo did, isn't very smart decision.

Right. There is no one to pressure him. There's really no one to replace him. As that one thread we had pointed out earlier (building off of GAF research, of course...) the board is stacked with his people. It would take full-on, universal investor revolt to do anything drastic, and that's not how things work in Japan.

There´s a good (and scary) post I read on Gaf, let me put it here:

I think some of you guys are missing the point about all this - there really isn't much Iwata could have done - really - he had the option of turning the company into a F2P/mobile company four years ago and embracing that business model like many Japanese publishers did - or to take a risk and try to stay in the packaged software business and spending tremendous resources scaling Nintendo's capabilities to meet the bar of high-end software development without overextending themselves. 

At that time people were questioning whether Sony was going to make a new console as the company was nearly bankrupt (and still is almost bankrupt - it's basically a zombie firm with a ridiculous amount of debt), and Microsoft had pretty much abandoned Japan (the source of 30% of Nintendo's gross profits). It isn't as if Nintendo could even have gone third-party - the only real options were to embrace the iPad and iPhone which were nascent platforms in Japan and had a style of games that Nintendo had never made.

If somehow Iwata were removed - the company would most likely move towards mobile and most likely free to play models since Iwata and his executive team are the last holdouts in the entire Japanese video game industry keeping traditional complete games a priority. I mean I guess some of you would want that because you want more free to play games, but I'm guessing a lot of you wouldn't be too happy about that. A new CEO would likely kill off Monolith Soft since they have been a perpetual cost center for Nintendo over the years, and probably cut off the dozen or so companies that Nintendo works with and keeps feeding like Grezzo, etc. I'd imagine they would kill Bayonetta 2 (or send it to die with zero marketing to cut their losses) and probably kill niche series like Pikmin from ever being produced ever again. Platinum in its current form would probably disappear since Nintendo has been effectively paying their bills over the past two years. MGR:R barely made them any money - they were hired as contractors - and a sequel to that game isn't going to be enough to keep everyone at Platinum employed. Nintendo's overall hiring plans would probably be frozen, and staff would be cut - probably at the high-end developers like EAD Tokyo which over hired to stock pile human resources for HD development over the past two years. Under a hypothetical new CEO, I wouldn't expect much in the way of new AAA console games from Nintendo if Iwata were fired since he is one of the few people who still believes in making them.

Shareholders aren't going to replace Iwata with someone that is going to make hardcore AAA IPs as a first party or as a third party for PS/Xbox platforms, or have Nintendo build a competitor to those platforms. The failure of the Wii U and the failure of their packaged software business in general (consider that out of 40+ million 3DS consoles - Zelda sold peanuts during the Holiday season) is going to lead investors to focus on someone that is going to embrace contemporary trends in gaming. That means lots of F2P an P2W and other things like low development costs on mobile to maximize gross profits. This has implications for the entire industry.

A world where Nintendo gives up on premium software is a scary one because it is going to drive expectations of all customers and spill across the entire industry. EA might be able to ride out the next few years with cheap updates to Madden and FIFA licenses and force yearly upgrades - Activision might have World of Warcraft money - which while declining rapidly - still keeps the lights on. But the former is effectively a peasant of Microsoft (and praying to be bought out by Microsoft or Disney), and the latter is deep in debt and is banking on a single game (Destiny) to deliver any profitability next fiscal year while depending on its Chinese investors to provide cash if they need it. Who knows maybe Destiny does great - but the millions it will sell to a core userbase aren't going to be enough to help Sony/MS drive their user bases up to 70-80 million needed to really achieve profitability at-scale.

Beyond that, Ubi's Just Dance money isn't going to sustain itself and Assassin's Creed is a franchise-in-decline. If Watchdogs fails to sell ridiculous numbers, I would expect Ubi to fully embrace F2P and focus heavily on mobile going forward. I can see them running to Apple and offering to make Rayman an iPad exclusive in return for cash payments. Take Two is already contracting its portfolio, and now it's more or less a two-products a year company. Bioshock4 and GTA6 might just be persistent online worlds with monthly subscriptions or a F2P model. I have a feeling NBA2K is going to go the F2P route in a few years as well - because that's probably where EA is going to take NBA Live to try and compete - and unlike the NFL - the NBA is probably not going to cut an exclusive with Take Two to preserve pricing power and risk lawsuits.

Even people like Peter Moore who have mastered the art of selling out their current employer for their next job and want nothing more than to see Nintendo suffer, are most likely trembling at hearing about Nintendo's current-year numbers.

Management was either lying to investors back in April or they are just completely incompetent.  9 months ago they were expecting a fairly sizable operating income.  That has now changed to a loss that is nearly equal to their operating losses the past two fiscal years.  This has to be one of the most extreme reversals for a major companies financials ever (barring natural disasters, financial collapses, etc).

Then of course there are the hardware numbers.  The 3DS original prediction seemed high even back then, but not completely unreasonable.  It was within the confines of reality that Pokemon/Monster Hunter/cheap hardware revision could give it a decent boost.  I'm curious though how profitable the 2DS is.  Especially when they were selling it at $99.  Wonder if that had an impact on the huge slash to operating income.

The Wii U is another can of worms.  That 9 million forecast always looked ridiculous.  That brings us back to whether they were lying or incompetent.  Again I wonder if they were planning on a price drop and so many bundles when I look at that cut to operating income.  However if they weren't planning on that, what on earth was going to launch the Wii U to 9 million.  They made these forecasts in late April.  It should have been abundantly clear that the Wii U would struggle for at least the first half of the fiscal year.

I guess we'll see if Iwata can keep his job against three straight years of Operating losses.

At my work I had to explain what the Wiiu actually is to a mainstream gamer that only plays third party games.

Lets call him a "gamer". Even gamers dont know what WiiU is..... he wanted to buy it but did not know if it was a Wii addon or a seperate system so instead of being burned he decided to not buy anything.

The name is fucking STUPID. Wii2 would be so much better and the name would have the same purpose.

You know like. "Wii want it, U will too" "Wii want it, you will 2" 2 could be used the same way the U to show thats its not only a system Wii want to play but also U/you too/2.

I think I peed a little...

All hypothetical, ultimately, because there is no new CEO candidate Nintendo could get a hold of that would gut Nintendo like that, simply because, for better or worse, Iwata has surrounded himself with like-minded individuals (i'd hesitate to say yes-men, because i really don't know anything about the politics of Nintendo's board of directors), but the key is that it isn't Iwata alone who holds these views, but Nintendo's leadership as a whole.

By the hammer of Thor...

Seriously, though, as a number of people have already pointed out, what made this situation sososo worse is the drastic-ness of this reduction. 9m -> 2.8m is admitting that you were almost as wrong as you could possibly be and didn't see it - or were too ignorant to admit it - until the last possible moment. And that's definitely not a good position to be in. A series of less drastic cut backs over the past 3 financial reports would've made this situation slightly more tolerable. People like me would still mock him for being so off the mark to begin with but at least it would show he realised before now what dire straights the Wii-U is in.

The projected loss is surprising though. I'd have thought they would be able to maintain profitability through this, especially with some big software hits from the 3DS and still relatively decent sales from that.

I don't know what to think about removing Iwata. Personally, I like and dislike a great number of things about the guy, probably in equal measure on both. He does a hell of a lot of good and a hell of a lot of bad. I think I'd like to see what someone else could do at the helm, though.