Aren't the European sales looking to be pretty impressive this week though? I keep hearing Wii U sold 20,000 in France alone, the UK had a sales spike of 660%. All of Europe only sold 43,000 PS4s last week, the most of any console, so things may not be as bad as people would have you believe.

Good software number which makes the hardware number surprising. If it could stay at 15-20k for a few weeks, that'd be nice. Lack of a bundle there hurt I guess. I was expecting about 30K myself, with about 150K worldwide. Second half of that is still possible as Europe seemed to have a larger boost.

Hopefully software will get a bit of a boost too.  Wii Fit U is still chugging away there.

Very interesting viewpoint. I think however that the problem is both the software and the hardware. In my case, I bought a WiiU because I'd never owned a Nintendo home console and wanted to play some exclusive games for WiiU. The only Mario games I played were on game boy back when I was a kid. While I loved 3DW, TWW and MK8, I must admit that were Nintendo to release a new console focused on these series again, I simply wouldn't buy it. Similarly, had i owned a Wii, I wouldn't have bought a WiiU as well. The lack of diversity in their software is their weakest point imo. Of course that just my personal opinion. Also, the main reasons why I bought a WiiU are X and Bayo2, I'm basically a "normal gamer" (as opposed to "historical nintendo fans") and Nintendo isn't doing anything to appeal to me, except Bayo2 and X which are not very "nintendo-ish" and are very niche games anyway.

Not the boost I had hoped for, but hopefully it'll have some kind of longterm effect. The actual game sold really well though.

I think we may need to wait for Xmas to see a boost. Last year it sold awfully, but had great sales in December + first week of January and an over 100k week no one predicted, I think with Mario Kart and Smash Bros the boost will be much bigger than last year in December.
In the future no because I guess Sony will have some Kingdom Hearts or Final Fantasy to compete. Unless the Pokemon fighting game is true.

Hah! 350k, beating my prediction. Excellent.

WiiU hardware is a bit disappointing indeed. I won't bash it, because we're going to need to get used to low sales in Japan. The region is terrible all around and I don't see getting better any time soon, even for the handhelds. People seem to be going mobile en masse. I just hope WiiU's baseline will be lifted towards the 10k 'permanently' at least.

PS4 isn't showing any signs of slowing down it's drop. Is it's baseline going to be 3k-ish like WiiU's last year? Terrible. Microsoft shouldn't even bother with Japan realistically.

Great MK8 numbers!
Wii U numbers disappointing, but the home console market is dying there anyway...
France alone seems to have sold more Wii Us than Japan.

Couldn't have put it better myself.

Famitsu was the metric you were using? AFAIK, most people use Media Create. If you don't want to choose, averaging the two isn't bad either.

Good opening for Mario Kart, but why such a low hardware boost? My guess was 25k and I thought I was lowballing it. If Mario Kart can't convince people to buy WiiUs then console gaming is truly dead in Japan.