Nintendo confident about Wii U success during holiday season

By: Muhammad Qasim Hassan

  |   October 31st, 2012   |  

Uncategorized

Irrespective of what the industry analysts have been saying over the last few months, Nintendo is confident about its upcoming console Wii U enjoying a healthy launch next month.

The company’s president Satoru Iwata shared his confidence during a financial presentation about the next-generation console making a strong impact in North America, Europe and Australia, where it is due to come out during November.

He pointed out that the pre-order figures for the upcoming console makes it clear that a strong demand for it already exists in the market and thus the system is going to sell really well during the holiday season.

Reports from earlier this month had revealed that several retailers had ran out of pre-order stocks, with a significant amount of customers still deprived of the opportunity to pre-order the upcoming console.

The Nintendo executive noted that the company has deviated from its traditional strategy of launching the system with several titles.

This strategy, while effective in ensuring an excellent launch for the consoles, resulted in the sales dropping with the passage of time because there was just not enough fresh experience on offer as the consoles grew old.

This time around, however, the company has managed to push back a number of titles that it originally planned on releasing with the Wii U launch.

The third-party support enabled Nintendo to chance its strategy and instead formulate a more viable and effective one, which involves releasing some of the highly-anticipated titles of renowned franchises during the next year, which is expected to keep the appeal and thus the sales of the console from falling too quickly.

“Nintendo tends to release too many titles at the launch of a hardware system and as a result suffers a drop in new games for quite some time after launch, and for the Wii U launch, we are being very careful not to let it happen,” he said. “Fortunately, third-party publishers overseas are launching many titles for us this time, and we were able to push back the release of some of the titles that we had originally intended to release as launch titles until next year.”

While Wii U is launching with a new Mario game as well as a Pikmin game, the likes of Zelda and Metroid are missing from the list comprising of 23 launch titles.

This did not go down too well with the fans that were really looking forward to getting an opportunity to join Link on his latest adventure or accompany Samus on his latest galactic mission in HD for the first-time ever.

Nintendo has no intention of extending the life of its console by keeping the fans deprived of their favourite franchises for too long and has already announced a Zelda game for next year, whereas hints have already been dropped regarding the development of an equally popular brand, though its identity has not yet been revealed.

Wii U is scheduled to hit the shelves in North America on November 18, followed by its release in Europe and Australia on November 30 and finally in Japan on December 8.