I believe it is a someone in the past that said one action can change the course of the world, evidently this is quite true as by one action alone or the force of one person with a vision the world has been changed several times over. On a much smaller scale Satoru Iwata the president of Nintendo believes that one killer game could change the Wii U’s fate and make it a success. At last weeks Investor meeting Iwata continued to show support of the Wii U as he went to say they would not move on without making the Wii U successful. At the meeting an Investor questioned if the Wii U could improve in sales before the next fiscal year.
Iwata quickly referenced the game boy and some of its struggles the game boy was in a slump until Pokemon came along Iwata said “the Pokemon game singlehandedly changed the landscape of the system, which then started to show the strongest sales in the lifecycle of the system”. This comment alone suggests that Nintendo may have something as strong as Pokemon in the works that they hope to drive sales with or that with a bigger game sales could be driven.
Regarding Wii U, Iwata did mention that Nintendo “would like to work hard to make sure that we give sufficient momentum to the system so that we can expect good results in and after the next fiscal year”.
Here is Iwata’s full comment:
As for Wii U, we estimated 9.00 million units of hardware in sales in the last fiscal year, but many of you must be aware of the actual results, and the Wii U market has experienced a sharp downturn. In order to recreate momentum and sell 5.00 million or 10.00 million units of hardware annually, there are indeed challenges that we must overcome. And in the face of these challenges, announcing more optimistic figures before we actually release the Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. titles to consumers, would not be compatible with our original stance to provide rather conservative figures, so once again we set our estimates by considering how much we could realistically hope to achieve with our software lineup. The fate of a video game system is often influenced greatly by the introduction of a single title. As many of you probably remember, before the release of the Pokémon game, Game Boy had been showing slow growth, and many people wondered whether it was the end of Game Boy. But the Pokémon game singlehandedly changed the landscape of the system, which then started to show the strongest sales in the lifecycle of the system. As I explained back in January, it is true that we cannot draw up a good business plan for Wii U by assuming that Wii U will sell more than Wii did. Therefore, we will need to think very carefully about the balance of revenue and expenses and try to operate by controlling overall costs. On the other hand, we do not believe that this year’s estimate of 3.60 million units of Wii U hardware will be the peak of its lifecycle, and we would like to work hard to make sure that we give sufficient momentum to the system so that we can expect good results in and after the next fiscal year, too. However, as for this fiscal year, as I explained before, the figures you see have been determined by rather conservative estimates.
For the Wii U I believe among there upcoming games we may see a potential sale driver from the likes of Mario Kart 8, Hyrule Warriors or even X. Or maybe there might even be something else that may be a surprise and make sales improve on the Wii U who knows anything is possible in this crazy world of ours.
Source: Nintendo Everything
