silvergunner said:
tak13 said:
There is a new rumour, which claims that nintendo is restricting wii u supply, to avoid unsold inventory...
Some people have the tendency to take rumors as facts. Personally, I was always thinking that they don't replenish the shelves with wii u units sufficiently on purpose, but because they want to move the demand to pokken tournament wii u bundle which arrives on the 18th of March, anywise stock problems are expected...
Sales in Japan exceeded in a great extend Nintendo's expectations, due to splatoon and super mario maker, which caused a relatively outstanding holiday perfomance, similar to 2013 which was wii u best year, when it had killer deals/offers, and outdid 2014 by approximately double numbers, that with the pricey splatoon and super mario maker bundles. So manufactured wii u stock was nearly depleted, something that Nintendo wasn't anticipating...
Probably, Nintendo was considering that what they sold in a year, it would be sold between two years. p.s I have put paragraphs but my post appears like a wall of text, WTF!
|
There's also a rumour flying around that Nintendo stopped ordering the custom chips for the Wii-U after the 2014 holiday season. I would not be surprised if the lack of inventory is because Nintendo quit manufacturing Wii-U consoles completely at the same time as they had too many in stock unsold. Like the Microsoft Surface RT (the product that cost Steve Ballmer his job) they've probably got millions stashed in warehouses, virtually unsellable due to competition from the others in the market. Like the RT, nobody will buy a system with less software than the alternatives and costs the same or more (in many UK shops you can find the Xbox One selling for less now), even if the brand name on it is appealing (Microsoft still holds higher brand value in small business than Apple or Google).
I think what is most telling about the situation though is the graph comparing software sales to hardware. The red line for GameCube is higher above the blue line for hardware, while the inverse is true for Wii-U. This suggests less software is been bought by users of Wii-U, which in itself suggests that many of the systems sold are not in active use after a few months of ownership. They could either have been sold, traded in, or left in a cupboard to gather dust.
|
Easy/ generalizing assumptions...Which are invalid/exaggerating.
Firstly, comparisons of official sales with shipment data by Nintendo, show that there aren't many wii us on the shelves... (expected, Nintendo/stores ship/orders as much as they can sold/conservatively, and some stores don't even have it/order it) For instance, the stock was just 60k in the whole japan every quarter... Last quarter, it was less.
As for the software thing, you don't take into account, the fact that wii u has no third party support, while gc had some for considerable time before losing it. Even, if wii u owners would like to buy more software, this isn't possible due to no third party support (therefore not a plenty of choices).
At least they buy first party software like crazy at most. So, a big part of gc software numbers are third party title sales, wii u relies almost exclusively on first party games, which they do extremely well, especially when considering hardware sales, equal with gc if not better.
Mario kart 8 has sold 7.24m and counting (having a 57% attach rate, which so far is growing every quarter by 1-2%, instead of falling, the more wii us the way more mario kart 8 sales), on 12.6m wii u and counting, while Mario kart double dash has sold 6.95m on 21.74 consoles and Mario kart 8 sold more in its second holiday time, than the first. Super mario maker ( release- mid september '15) and the brand new unproven ip splatoon (release-late may '15) reached 1m in less thant 1 month. First stands at 3.34m and the other at 4m as of december 2015.
Actually, Wii u owners buy software ( whatetever they find good/like )and they also starve about it, since there is no third party support which has a result of long time game draughts. I have put paragraphs but my post appears like a wall of text... The problem, continues. Sh@t.
