Following Nintendo's internal estimate that the company sold through 3 million Wii consoles in the U.S. during the month of December, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told Reuters that he believes the Wii has bounced back. "I think it's now safe to say the Wii has recovered from slowdown," he told the news organization. "It's a combination of factors. Towards December, our software lineup got stronger. Also, the price cut certainly helped, although it is not the sole factor."
At the same time, however, Iwata cautioned that just because the Wii had a solid performance during the holidays doesn't mean it's made a full recovery; the momentum has to be maintained in 2010. "But I'm not sure if it's prudent to use words like revival and recovery lightly before making absolutely certain we can maintain this momentum. So, I steer clear of such words today," he added.
After Nintendo's profits dipped over 52% for the company's first half, thanks in part to sluggish Wii sales, Iwata was naturally quite displeased. He said back in November that Nintendo was on an "urgent mission" to recover the Wii's momentum.
While the Wii obviously cannot maintain sales of 3 million sold per month in the U.S., it will be interesting to watch its sales pattern in 2010. In the second half of 2009, it seemed that many publishers realized that core games were simply not selling on the Wii, and just yesterday Sega basically confirmed that it would no longer publish mature Wii titles. This is a problem that Nintendo will have to contend with as it also faces the impending threat of Microsoft's Project Natal and Sony's motion controller.
1 Comments
January 7, 2010
I think the Wii will be much more susceptible to quarterly sales trends (as in, it won't be selling out EVERY month, just during the holidays) but we'll see. This early part of 2009 will be interesting because it has a lot of momentum, but there aren't a lot of new software titles coming down the pipe.