Nintendo

There are rumors about Wii U sales in North America slipping below 40,000 units in April. But it’s a fact that Wii U sales in its home market of Japan spiraled below 7,000 units during the week ending May 12. This is an atrocious level. The ancient PS3 sold 12,000 units and the portable console champ 3DS sold 46,000 units during the same week. The PS Vita sold 12,000 units and even its predecessor the PSP managed to top 6,000 units. This means that the closest sales comparison to the Wii U is a Sony portable console that was replaced by a newer model more than a year ago. More →

Nintendo is running out of time to sell the Wii U before it gets heavy competition from both the PlayStation 4 and the next Xbox. As Engadget points out, Nintendo has reported selling just 390,000 Wii U consoles over the past quarter, which puts its total number of consoles sold at just 3.45 million. This means that Nintendo didn’t even hit its sales target of 4 million consoles sold by the end of March, despite the fact that it was a downward revision from an earlier sales target of 5.5 million. But this isn’t even the most humiliating aspect of Nintendo’s anemic Wii U sales record, since T3 notes that Nintendo has actually sold around 4 million of its original Wii consoles since the launch of the Wii U, meaning that gamers are still much more interested in its years-old model than the current version.

The Wii U has been one of the least successful product launches in Nintendo’s history so far and Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter believes that there’s very little hope sales of the console will pick up anytime soon. Per Benzinga, Pachter says that “only 55,000 Wii U consoles were sold domestically in March,” which is down from the 66,000 consoles Nintendo sold in February and the 57,000 consoles it sold in January. What’s more, Pachter doesn’t think there’s much Nintendo can do to boost sales in the future as the Wii U’s “fortunes appear unlikely to improve for several months, even if Nintendo decides to drop [the] price, as there are an insufficient number of core titles that are generating interest in the console.” In other words, it’s not even clear at this point that issuing a PS Vita-style price cut can spark interest in the Wii U until the game selection for the console significantly improves.

Sales of Nintendo’s (NTDOY) Wii U gaming console continue to falter, according to the latest retail figures. The NPD Group on Thursday released its U.S. video game sales figures for the month of February, which shows that overall sales of new hardware, software and accessories declined 25% year-over-year. Individual hardware sales were hit the hardest, dropping a whopping 36% from February 2012 as consumers wait for the “Xbox 720″ and PlayStation 4. More →

Nintendo (NTDOY) on Wednesday acknowledged what the world has long known — that virtually no one is buying its Wii U console. The Wall Street Journal reports that Nintendo has lowered its sales target for the Wii U from 5.5 million units by the end of March to just 4 million units based on “its performance in the year-end sales season and afterward.” Nintendo has also slashed its Wii U software sales estimates “by a third to 16 million units,” the Journal writes. Recent reports have pegged Wii U sales as low as 21,000 per week, or roughly the same as Sony’s (SNE) six-year-old PlayStation 3.

In just a week, the problems Nintendo’s (NTDOY) new home console is facing have cascaded into something sinister. The traditional post-New Year slump hit Nintendo’s home market in the week ending January 12 and exposed cruelly how weak the consumer interest in Wii U truly is. According to Famitsu, Wii U sales slumped from a pace of 70,000 per week to just 21,000. The ancient PlayStation 3 sold the exact same number of units, which is nothing short of a debacle for Nintendo. The hot portable console 3DS saw its sales slow down from 305,000 units to 106,000 units.  This means that Nintendo’s portable machine is now outselling the brand new home console by a 5-to-1 margin in Japan. More →