Wii-Nintendo

No two ways about it; these are testing time for Nintendo. Its recent financial results lay bare its currentstruggles, particularly with regard to its home console business. Its third-quarter figures followed a significant revision of its optimistic sales estimates for Wii U, down from 9 million to 2.85 million. That’s less than a third of the original forecast, and it still has to sell another 400,000 consoles before April to reach that adjusted tally.

Meanwhile, Nintendo’s grossly inflated figures managed to give the 3DS’s strong year a downbeat twist ending. After what many would suggest was a banner year for the handheld, with numerous high-quality software releases and the biggest sales of any current gaming device, estimates still had to be revised down – from 18 million to 13.5 million units sold. Those numbers might yet hint at a wider malaise within the console industry. Even as strong early sales of PlayStation 4 and Xbox One suggest otherwise, it remains to be seen whether Sony and Microsoft can take advantage of the initial excitement surrounding new-generation hardware, or whether business will dwindle after the rush of early adopters.
Regardless, the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are enjoying a far more positive start than the Wii U. In the United Kingdom, indeed, less than a week had passed before both had outsold the lifetime figures for Nintendo’s latest console. The difference hasn’t been quite so extreme in other territories, but the sales follow a similar pattern, while Nintendo’s historically rocky relationship with third-party publishers keeps plumbing new depths. It began with Ubisoft – historically one of Nintendo’s strongest allies – deciding that Rayman Legends, promoted heavily by Nintendo in the run-up to Wii U’s launch, would be delayed and ported to other formats.
EA, meanwhile, decided that FIFA 14 wouldn’t be released on Wii U, the first time in over a decade the series had skipped a current Nintendo console. Just four games from the publisher – all of them ports of existing PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 games – have been released on Wii U to date, with no plans to add to that meagre total.
How did it come to this? There are several factors to consider. Nintendo’s ‘blue ocean’ strategy worked for a generation, but it failed to capitalise on the gains it had made. The audience of casual players that were won over by the likes of Wii Sports, Wii Fit and Brain Training were soon distracted by fresh novelties. Kinect was quite successfully pitched as the next evolution in motion controls, even if Microsoft’s camera invariably ended up in many cupboards, left to collect dust alongside the Wii Balance Board.
Then began the increasingly rapid rise of smartphone, tablet and browser-based gaming: simple, accessible and free to a vast potential audience.

Share on Google Plus

About Unknown

This is a short description in the author block about the author. You edit it by entering text in the "Biographical Info" field in the user admin panel.