Nintendo Wii U sales are still awful

Poor Nintendo. Its “next-gen” system has had a horrible start, despite having a year lead in on both Microsoft and Sony's systems. New figures announced during Nintendo's quarterly earnings report, suggest that worldwide, it only sold 160,000 of the machines between April and June this year.

Game sales were a little more impressive at just over a million. Though when you put this in comparison with the 3DS, a much more popular machine, over 11 million handheld games were sold – dwarfing its home console brother.

As Kotaku points out, even the Wii outsold the Wii U, pushing 210,000 units worldwide.

‘Lol, we can't even give them away'

However, Nintendo hasn't given up yet. It has a plan to turn things around: “We will attempt to concentrate on proactively releasing key first-party titles from the second half of this year through next year to regain momentum for the platform,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Starting with ‘Pikmin 3,' which was released in Japan and Europe in July and will be released in the United States in August, we plan on releasing key titles such as ‘The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD,' ‘Wii Party U,' ‘Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze,' ‘Super Mario 3D World,' and ‘Wii Fit U.'

The problems there, for a lot of Wii U owners, is that they might have played a few of these games before. Zelda: The Wind Waker is an HD re-release of the 2003 Gamecube title, Super Mario 3D land is a re-release of the 2011 3DS title and Wii Fit U is simply an updated version of the non-game Wii Fit.

Donkey Kong Country is at least something quite new, but all it's doing is adding some new levels and camera angles to a long standing game format.

To make things worse for Nintendo, Asda recently announced it would no longer be stocking the console or its games and would instead focus its attention on the 3DS.

KitGuru Says: The future does not look bright for Nintendo on this one. What's interesting though, is that despite these sales numbers, people aren't selling the machines on. Just look at ebay, there's a handful of second hand Wii Us and they all go for around full retail, suggesting that once you buy one of these you're happy with it. Is it just a case of marketing issues perhaps?

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