Nintendo Only Shipped 160,000 Wii U Consoles Worldwide in Q2
Nintendo has released its latest financial results, and revealed quarterly Wii U hardware sales of just 160,000. Software sales for the system were just 1.3 million units.
During the period Nintendo sold 90,000 Wii U consoles in Japan, 60,000 in the US and only 10,000 in Europe and Australia.
In the previous three months Wii U sales were 390,000 hardware units and 13.42 million games, which left the company short of it’s projected 4 million sales in the financial year.
For the three months ended June 30 net sales were up 3.8 per cent to ¥81.5 billion ($832.6m / £547.5m) with net profit at ¥8.6 billion ($88m / £57.9m), compared to a loss of ¥17.2 billion for the same period last year.
Nintendo suffered an operating loss during the period of ¥4.9 billion ($50.2m / £33m) due to research and development for the Wii U and increased marketing costs overseas for the 3DS.
A lack of software support – both from Nintendo’s own in-house development teams and third-party publishers – combined with a high initial price tag and a slow user interface did little to accelerate sales over the Christmas period.
Almost nine months on and little has changed. Nintendo has slashed the price of the Wii U, but the games drought continues. Considerable mismanagement over the functionality of the console and its innovative GamePad tablet controller has also done little to persuade consumers.
