Wii U photo via Wikimedia Commons
Nintendo’s gaming console, the Wii U, has fallen way behind the company’s estimates, leading Nintendo to pull back sales expectations by 70pc.
In what could prove to be a death knell for the Japanese company’s hopes of continuing the success of the Wii console, Nintendo has had to scale back its 2014 sales estimates from 9m devices to 2.8m.
Launched in November 2012, the console was expected to bring a much more powerful device from the relatively less technical Wii, which had been targeted successfully at the family market.
However, despite initial high sales numbers of 3.75m in its first year, the company has failed to keep interest going in the console, and the launch of the Xbox One and PS4 towards the end of last year has pushed it outside the consciousness of most gamers.
‘Huge gap from their targets’
The company expected to see a significant increase in console sales over the Christmas period but found numbers to be coming up short.
Earlier today, Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata released a statement explaining the decision to lower expectations: “Wii U sales … showed some progress in the year-end sales season as we released various compelling titles from the summer onwards, launched hardware bundles at affordable price points and also performed a markdown of the hardware in the US and European markets; however, they fell short of our targeted recovery by a large margin.
“In particular, sales in the US and European markets in which we entered the year-end sales season with a hardware markdown were significantly lower than our original forecasts, with both hardware and software sales experiencing a huge gap from their targets,” he added.
“In addition, we did not assume at the beginning of the fiscal year that we would perform a markdown for the Wii U hardware in the US and European markets.”
