«The Wii U, which Olson and Connor expect will ship in the fall of this year with a price tag of $299 or greater, is forecast to sell only 35 percent of the volume of the original Wii during its first 14 months, due to "disappointing" hardware specs and competition from the mobile games industry.»
Wait, what?
A) The original Wii was substantially supply-constrained for the first 14 (and many more) months. Performance 35% of that would be
a little below Gamecube levels*. Frankly, this seems a bit off given the continuing momentum of existing Nintendo software franchises. It would have been better (albeit still terrible) to try to figure out how much Wii's
sales demand for the first 14 months were and then take a third of that, even though that's pretty impossible. They're forecasting a nearly dead system despite the market for console gaming having grown markedly since the PS2/GCN/XBX generation.
B) The Wii was
far more disappointing in hardware specs for its time than the Wii U. It used an out of date type of gpu (lacking, for instance, modern shaders), whereas the Wii U's is out of the gate not out of date (it pretty much will have all relevant gpu features that the competing future system are expected to have. Moreso, while the Wii was
phenomenally slower than the competition from Day One, the Wii U will be the most powerful system on the market for perhaps as much as a year.
C) I can't speak from authority about competition from the mobile games industry, but neither can the analyst here. There's one slightly similar feature between the Wii U and the market segment involving cell phones and tablets, and beyond that the systems are
substantially different. This seems to be the case where the system principally caters to the home console market
and also extends a small reach into the mobile market. That would seem to suggest an
expansion of the relevant markets that the system can appeal to, not a
constriction from one market in which the manufacturer was previously dominant into a market in which it is not.
In conclusion: I don't have the answers, and I really can't say how well the system will sell, but the analyst here misses several important points in his single sentence. This may throw off the given projections.
*Gamecube was considered a crushing defeat in a market much smaller than the current one.