The Wii U ends and Nintendo's silent on Switch
Nintendo has already told us that they're not talking about the Nintendo Switch until January 2017. And according to Eurogamer, Wii U is dead to the company:
“Nintendo will end Wii U production this Friday, multiple sources have confirmed to Eurogamer.
At the last official count, as of 30th September, Nintendo had shipped 13.36m Wii U consoles. The Wii U’s final tally will likely now be only slightly more.
For comparisons sake, GameCube sold 21m. N64 sold 32m. Wii sold 101m.
Nintendo’s Japanese production line will shut down for the last time this week after the final deadline for orders passed yesterday, Eurogamer understands. Only a small number of further orders were placed.”
After a failure of fairly large proportions, Nintendo is being cautious with it's Switch predictions. They're predicting to ship only 2 million launch units through March, that's about a month of sales for the console. In comparison, the Xbox One sold about 2 million units in 18 days, and PS4 shipped 4.3 million and sold 2.1 million. The key-word here is ship. It means Nintendo is sending these boxes to stores all over the world, but not necessarily selling them to consumers.
If Nintendo's really all done with WiiU, I just don't know why Nintendo won't stoke the fire for their next console with less than 6 months left to go before they expect people to buy it. Only companies with huge sales and loyalty like Apple can manage to announce a product and sell it to people in the same week. We still don't know officially if it has a touch screen, how long it will last before we need to charge it, how powerful it will be, or if we'll even really get a 3D Mario at launch. It's all speculation, and gamers are the kind of consumer that are voracious for those kind of details if they're going to fork over their wallets.
Keeping the Wii U on shelves without a significant price reduction when giant isles of stores like Best Buy and Toys R' Us an end of life platform is good business, and shitty customer experience.