The Wii U has been a handful for Nintendo to say the least. While it hasn’t performed remotely as well as its hugely successful predecessor, Nintendo still feels the struggling console has a future.
According to President Satoru Iwata, the magic bullet that could literally pluck the system from obscurity and place it back on top of the next-gen heap is one thing: a killer app. As I reported yesterday , Iwata looked to the companies handheld history for inspiration as to what may still lie ahead for the Wii U. “Game Boy had been showing slow growth,” he remembers “and many people wondered whether it was the end of Game Boy. But the Pokémon game singlehandedly changed the landscape of the system, which then started to show the strongest sales in the lifecycle of the system.”
Unfortunately, I feel Iwata perhaps is understating just how deep the Wii U’s crater measures (as the Game Boy never cost the company almost half a billion dollars in lost revenue as their current hardware has).
Iwata does admit that even though their current outing bares the same name, it’s time to stop comparing it to the previous milestones of the original Wii. Suggesting that it’s time they set new goals for the future, Iwata says the company can’t “…draw up a good business plan for Wii U by assuming that Wii U will sell more than Wii did. Therefore, we will need to think very carefully about the balance of revenue and expenses and try to operate by controlling overall costs… we do not believe that this year’s estimate of 3.60 million units of Wii U hardware will be the peak of its lifecycle.”
Nintendo also has a new project currently in-development for overseas markets, which we will bring you the latest on as it breaks.