I love it this way.

Nintendo always denies Nikkei reports, but Nikkei pretty much has a spot less track record.

Even the Seaman 3DS game that Nikkei reported, at Iwata's funeral last year the creator of Seaman confirmed he was working with Nintendo on a Seaman 3DS game, it just stalled in development, so they were right even about that. 

From the sounds of it this isn't even an official comment from Nintendo, sounds like some random rep was contacted. 

Its probably still true.

poor Nintendo D:

rumor comes out = its true!
rumor gets debunked = its still true!

we should push Nintendo into the mud to finish them off. Mud fight!

Maybe Nintendo don't want a big surge in Wii U sales because people will feel it's their last chance to buy one. And then it sells out and Nintendo have no console to sell for months. That's all I can think of.

Nikkei says Nintendo developing smartphone games (Jan 2014):

http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/27/5352004/nintendo-reportedly-making-smartphone-mini-games

Nintendo denies it, says we're not making smartphone games (Jan 2014):

http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/28/nintendo-denies-smartphone-games/

Nintendo announces they're making smartphone games (Mar 2015):

http://time.com/3747248/nintendo-dena-mobile-gaming-consoles-sony-microsoft/

People who "collect" consoles in that way are likely a niche, small audience. It's more likely demand for Wii U in a broad sense will drop further with this news leaking out and as such Nintendo may be forced to eat unsold inventory (thus taking a $200+ loss on each unit) to maintain good standing with key retail partners ahead of NX launch. 

It's obvious Nintendo would have preferred this to not have leaked and no one would have been any wiser most likely since the Wii U sells at such low volumes anyway, at least in North America and Europe a "shortage/stock dump" likely would've gone largely undetected. 

Of course they'd deny it

This could cost Nintendo several million dollars, lets just say as a result of this report they end up having the eat the cost on 100,000 Wii U units ... that's not a ton of systems, but still lets assume a manufacturing cost of around $200/unit ... that comes out to 20 million dollars lost, not the end of the world, but certainly not something Nintendo would want.

They can't ask retailers to eat that loss, because retailers will get angry at them ahead of the NX launch.

So it was in Nintendo's best interest to keep this news very quiet.

I thought we already debunked that rumor. How can they stop production in 2016 when they stopped 2 years ago?