Now that Nintendo has posted its earnings report for the last fiscal year, another wave of doomsaying is making its way across the Internet: The Wii U is dead in the water, the 3DS is underperforming, there are no games, and Nintendo is struggling in an ever-changing industry.
Or something like that. Each accusation has some element of truth to it, but the excessive pessimism surrounding Nintendo these days is, well, excessive. The Wii U has only been out for five months now, and regardless of how awful the last couple have been, one can't easily count out Nintendo just yet.
Of course, there's no doubt the 2013 numbers have been abysmal so far. Nintendo only managed to sell about 400,000 Wii U systems since January. As T3 points out, the original Wii sold more than 2.5 million consoles during the same timeframe after its launch, but does that portend a future of failure?
At this point, it shouldn't be all that surprising that a console is outsold by its predecessor even in the wake of its launch. The Nintendo DS didn't start posting fantastic numbers until months after its release, and the 3DS was outsold by the original DS by a margin of two-to-one until Nintendo slashed its price by $80. That was only a few months after launch, too, and now it's considered by some to be the best system on the market.
Even if we were to look outside of Nintendo, to one of its main rivals, we'd see a similar story. When the PlayStation 3 was launched, it was outsold consistently by the PS2 for months. The price was prohibitively high for most consumers, and Sony failed to make a profit on the system for years. Fast forward to the present, and Sony's machine has turned into a more than capable system with a diverse array of titles.
To T3, though, the fact that the Wii U has been outsold by the Wii since launch (as opposed to just since the new year) is even worse.
"According to Nintendo's own figures, the 3.98m Wiis were sold since its new console launched. That's 53,000 more Wiis sold than Wii Us," the site reads.
Even here, though, expecting the Wii U to jump in and continue what was a torrid pace of sales isn't reasonable. The Wii was a global phenomenon, and any time an extremely successful console is followed up by another, it's not going to simply fall by the wayside. It already has an impressive library of titles, many of which can be purchased on the cheap, and the system's price drops as well. The Wii can be had for less than half the price of the Wii U, so it can't be that surprising to see sales remain steady.
None of this is to say the Wii U situation isn't of concern. The kinds of numbers the console is racking up are horrible, but declaring the system all but done before Nintendo releases any of its big titles is questionable. The GameCube never put up world-beating numbers, but Nintendo managed to make a profit off the console every year. E3 will be the next big opportunity for Nintendo to reignite interest in the console, and amid all the PS4 and Xbox 720 hype, it needs to make a big splash.
