Home Gaming Nintendo’s made a huge mistake

Nintendo’s made a huge mistake

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Heman

Nintendo recently released its third quarter financial results, and it appears that the Wii U launched well enough, but has since stalled somewhat, ending with some pretty disappointing hardware sales. It’s forced Nintendo to cut its total Wii U sales forecast from 5.5 million to 4 million – which just highlights Nintendo’s mistakes, according to industry analyst Michael Pachter.

“I always thought Nintendo’s Wii U software forecast made no sense,” said Wedbush Securities analyst and perpetual Nintendo hater Michal Pachter.

“They initially guided 24 million, are taking that down to 16 million, which is a 4:1 software attach rate. That’s reasonable, especially given that the installed base is 3 million hardware units now and the guidance implies they need to ship only 4.31 million more software units.”

He believes Nintendo’s overestimated the impact the Wii U would have, saying it just hasn’t captured people’s imaginations the same way the Wii did. He also believes that for the Wii U to succeed, Nintendo would have to do do what it did to help the 3DS gain a little momentum; slash the price.

“The hardware guidance is disappointing, and there isn’t really anything that will get hardware moving other than a price cut. I think they got it wrong with this console, it just doesn’t capture the imagination the way that the Wii did.”

And if they do – they need to do it right now, before Microsoft and Sony publicly release details of their next-gen consoles. The only problem? Nintendo’s already said that there will be no Wii U price-drops any time soon. 

“The Wii U is not going to be very competitive if Sony and Microsoft launch comparable consoles at comparable prices,” said Pachter. “The early weakness will cause many third party publishers to re-think support for the Wii U, and we might not see much support at holiday 2013.”

 

For once, I actually agree with the guy. As amazing as I, and many others, think the Wii U is – it doesn’t do anybody any good if nobody’s buying one – and a nice price-cut would go a long way in convincing people to give up the cash. Of course, Pachter also said that the 3DS would fail and the Vita would take over the world…so what does he know, right?

Last Updated: January 31, 2013

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