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ASDA has announced new price cuts for Wii U hardware and accessories, bringing the basic and premium packs down to £149.99 and £199.99 respectively. Controllers are also slashed by a third, bringing them to just over £26 and several games have been reduced too.
This price drop makes ASDA the cheapest place to find a Wii U console now, beating out rival ShopTo. HMV's premium pack deal was the best for a while, but good luck trying to find anything useful on HMV's trendy new, non-functioning website. It also falls in line with other supermarkets and companies that are simply trying to clear stock of the Wii U, which has proved a pretty huge flop in 2013, having sold just over 300,000 consoles in the past four months.
It did better before Christmas, shifting some three million, but since then sales have nosedived.
Not want you to want to see on your hardware just six months after launch
There's several reasons for this, the biggest most likely being the lack of big name games on the system. Monster Hunter Ultimate was a good get, but that's simply a reskin and expansion of the Wii's Tri and it's a pretty niche game series to begin with (even if it is awesome). On top of that, many Wii owners, who are very casual gamers, don't even realise the Wii U is a new system. It looks and sounds like an upgrade and Nintendo's marketing has failed to make this obvious enough.
KitGuru Says: If you're in the market for a cheap Wii U, now might not be a bad idea, but then again, if enough people hold off I'm sure we'll see another price drop soon enough. I'm waiting for it to hit £100 and then I'll grab one for Monster Hunter most likely.
