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NPD Sales Results for October 2013 [Up2: 3DS, 360, Pokemon Combined, GTAV]

Metallix87

Member
With the eDram provider shutting down the fab that is making the WiiU GPU in a year or two, the WiiU will never be profitable for Nintendo. It's a fucking mess. There is no way Iwata can keep his job and there is no way WiiU can live anything but a shortened lifecycle.

It's a bitter lesson, but let's hope Nintendo has learned that they can no longer stay out of the core market anymore.

Let's hope whoever replaces Iwata at the end of the fiscal year has greater vision for the company and their hardware.
 
Someone with access to historical numbers might want to go back and double check, but just roughly eyeballing some history, my previous 300K November and 600K December projections for Wii U seem way too generous.

It appears that in a typical year, hardware in November (aggregates) might be 2-2.5x that of October, and December can roughly double that again. So just on the face of it, we're looking at 100-125K November and 250K December for Wii U. But we've never (or rarely) seen something quite as abysmal as Wii U from Nintendo, so I'm hesitant to use those numbers as projections. At the same time, I certainly can't stick with 300-600K.

So since I like to call my shot and there are no consequences, anyway, since I'm not paid for this, I'll say... guh... 180K November and 360K December, and that is stepping well outside of any historical multiplier I can think of. Somebody find a better multiplier that might be more generous.
 

Dysun

Member
Terrible numbers for Sonic, they need to get off that platform. Just not a healthy ecosystem for 3rd parties whatsoever.

I really dont think the Wii U will muster over 250k next month, I'd be stunned. November NPD's will be very interesting with the launch of PS4/XB1.
 
I fully admit to be looking at this from a western perspective and perhaps Japanese companies operate differently, but Nintendo seems to have already been extremely patient with current leadership, but it can only go on so long. Iwata surely sees the writing on the wall and is waiting for the ax to drop. I think, at best, he's around long enough to deliver EOY results after the March 31 quarter.

Same here. I look at it from the U.S. side of things, but honestly, I don't see why Mr. Iwata has left certain employees in their current positions at NOA. I actually think one employee is only remaining at NOA, hoping that the ax will hit Mr. Iwata, and he will be promoted to CEO.

I mean, under the current NOA leadership, Amazon.com stopped carrying Nintendo consoles (only now do they carry the 3DS systems, and STILL not the Wii U/2DS systems). A year after the Wii U was released, and Amazon.com doesn't carry the Wii U...only in the United States. Which is supposedly Nintendo's most important home console region, at least based on history and sales.

NOA also had the worst Wii U launch ads, out of all the regions.

Which region has Nintendo had the most trouble getting/keeping third party support/relationships? In the U.S. EA dropped support of the Wii U, first time a cookie-cutter Madden game wasn't released on a Nintendo console in how many years?

Where was NOA's management? I look at NCL, and see them at least building relationships with Capcom, Sega, Namco Bandai and others there...what about NOA?

Where has NOA's management been for much of the last 2 years? The same management that didn't want to support the Wii with 100% developed/published games (Disaster: Day of Crisis, Pandora's Tower, The Last Story)

NOA's management has apparently been the same place their Wii U ads have been, non-existent. Though, they are getting paid, I'm just not sure for what.
 

Shion

Member
Worst case senerio: Wii U sells an average of 3.7 million a year worldwide (where is sits approx right now after 1 full year on the market)

3.7 million x 4 years max system lifespan (lets not kid about going to 5 years) = 14,800,000 systems sold. Taking this into account a console usually doesn't max out it's sales until it's 3rd year so Nintendo still has time to lower the price further and push the system for the next 2 years strong.

However even if those numbers do turn out true, it would be Nintendo's worst selling home console in it's history yes, but I'm sure those 15 million users (modern day Dreamcast) will have some great first party games to play during that time.

A BOMBA console with a low installed-base and lack of healthy 3rd party support to carry you between releases is bad for Nintendo's output too (now more than ever due to the costs and difficulty of HD development).

It will only result to rushed games, low-investments and safe productions (which, in return, will fail to act as system-sellers).
 
I think the last desperate move for Wii U is to find a way to cut it to $250. The losses would be horrible, but getting more systems out there creates a chance of software sales picking up. Or am I totally wrong in thinking this?
 
Someone with access to historical numbers might want to go back and double check, but just roughly eyeballing some history, my previous 300K November and 600K December projections for Wii U seem way too generous.

It appears that in a typical year, hardware in November (aggregates) might be 2-2.5x that of October, and December can roughly double that again. So just on the face of it, we're looking at 100-125K November and 250K December for Wii U. But we've never (or rarely) seen something quite as abysmal as Wii U from Nintendo, so I'm hesitant to use those numbers as projections. At the same time, I certainly can't stick with 300-600K.

So since I like to call my shot and there are no consequences, anyway, since I'm not paid for this, I'll say... guh... 180K November and 360K December, and that is stepping well outside of any historical multiplier I can think of. Somebody find a better multiplier that might be more generous.

I would go lower (see above) but that analysis seems fair.
 

Metallix87

Member
I think the last desperate move for Wii U is to find a way to cut it to $250. The losses would be horrible, but getting more systems out there creates a chance of software sales picking up. Or am I totally wrong in thinking this?

The system's going to be $260 this Black Friday at some locations, so I doubt another ten bucks would make a world of difference.
 
However even if those numbers do turn out true, it would be Nintendo's worst selling home console in it's history yes, but I'm sure those 15 million users (modern day Dreamcast) will have some great first party games to play during that time.

Not sure about that. That is because the user base, while it grows won't be large enough to cover the costs of bigger, more expensive great AAA Nintendo games. Every time Nintendo funds one it is just going to add more pain to the bottom line. Also, it does the console no good at all to have 15 million users at the end of life. They need numbers similar right now to justify development costs.

It is unfortunately a self fulfilling financial prophecy. Expect Nintendo to make smaller , more cost effective games and very very few epics or to start doing WiiU versions of 3DS titles so they can bundle budgets together.
 
Well you can look at it this way:

Is Super Mario 3D World worth buying a Wii U for? Most here seem to think so and my bet is that kids will think so as well this Christmas.

A Nintendo Christmas miracle would not surprise me at all.


Nintendo 64 had only a few games it's first year, but those games were totally amazing at the time. Nintendo just needs to focus on doing that for Wii U to make it hard to resist and then continue to drop the price.
 

Metallix87

Member
Well you can look at it this way:

Is Super Mario 3D World worth buying a Wii U for? Most here seem to think so and my bet is that kids will think so as well this Christmas.

A Nintendo Christmas miracle would not surprise me at all.


Nintendo 64 had only a few games it's first year, but those games were totally amazing at the time. Nintendo just needs to focus on doing that for Wii U to make it hard to resist and then continue to drop the price.

I'm not saying it's impossible, because it's not, but it's pretty unlikely at this point barring a MASSIVE marketing push.
 
Sadly I do not see it achieving that tier :( I will thoroughly enjoy Super Mario 3D World nonetheless.

Forgive me Aqua, I have decided to sell my Nintendo stock at 13,050 on the Nikkei (18% return).

I am scared of the PS4 aftershock and the effects it will have. I will open a new position once FY2013 is over and Iwata establishes a proper business plan with a restructuring.

I purchased 2 days ago stock of Sony (sorry Nintendo).

Good luck with 6758 (SNE). I mean that...really, good luck.
 

Sergiepoo

Member
With the eDram provider shutting down the fab that is making the WiiU GPU in a year or two, the WiiU will never be profitable for Nintendo. It's a fucking mess. There is no way Iwata can keep his job and there is no way WiiU can live anything but a shortened lifecycle.

It's a bitter lesson, but let's hope Nintendo has learned that they can no longer stay out of the core market anymore.
Not pleasing the core is the least of Nintendo's worries. The Wii U was mismanaged in every conceivable way including utterly misreading both the core market and the casual market. We have no idea if a casual directed console can still work in this ecosystem because Nintendo decided to kill the Wii prematurely. I still think the best course of action is to return to lessons of the Wii and build the next evolution of motion controls. The Wii U is absolutely not a proper successor to the Wii philosophy.
 

AniHawk

Member
september 2013:
3ds: 219k (43.8k/w)
ps3: 216k (43.2k/w)
360: 179k (35.8k/w)
wii u: 95k (19k/w)
vita: 41k (8.2k/w)

october 2013:
3ds: 452k +106% (133k/w +203%)
360: 166k -7.3% (41.5k/w +16%)
ps3: 110k -49% (27.5k/w -36.3%)
wii u: 55k -42.1% (13.8k/w -27.4%)
vita: 28k -31.7% (7k/w -14.6%)

3ds was the big winner this month. 360 sales went up too. everything else kinda sank a bit.
 
I would go lower (see above) but that analysis seems fair.

That's the thing, despite the results we've seen all year, I just can't bring myself to write low numbers for November and December, which is the only reason why I used my prior numbers in the first place. This is Nintendo! I call Wii U a "dead console walking" often enough, I suppose, but even still, it's hard to call for sales under a million the next two months, but all historical indicators suggest it might not even reach half of that. Or a third.

I... I can't bring myself to predict numbers that low. Can't do it. I could do it for Vita, surely, but Nintendo?
 
Not pleasing the core is the least of Nintendo's worries. The Wii U was mismanaged in every conceivable way including utterly misreading both the core market and the casual market. We have no idea if a casual directed console can still work in this ecosystem because Nintendo decided to kill the Wii prematurely. I still think the best course of action is to return to lessons of the Wii and build the next evolution of motion controls. The Wii U is absolutely not a proper successor to the Wii philosophy.


Nintendo didn't abandon it prematurely, their market collapsed around 2009 to 2010. By 2011 and 12 it was in freefall.

The next evolution in motion control like it or not is kinect, and its already here.
 
Worst case senerio: Wii U sells an average of 3.7 million a year worldwide (where is sits approx right now after 1 full year on the market)

3.7 million x 4 years max system lifespan (lets not kid about going to 5 years) = 14,800,000 systems sold. Taking this into account a console usually doesn't max out it's sales until it's 3rd year so Nintendo still has time to lower the price further and push the system for the next 2 years strong.

However even if those numbers do turn out true, it would be Nintendo's worst selling home console in it's history yes, but I'm sure those 15 million users (modern day Dreamcast) will have some great first party games to play during that time.

Jefferies Group projects sales trends of 10 million consoles shipped (similar to Dreamcast) over the Wii U's lifespan:

qtqqc6b.png
 
With the eDram provider shutting down the fab that is making the WiiU GPU in a year or two, the WiiU will never be profitable for Nintendo. It's a fucking mess. There is no way Iwata can keep his job and there is no way WiiU can live anything but a shortened lifecycle.

It's a bitter lesson, but let's hope Nintendo has learned that they can no longer stay out of the core market anymore.

I hope you realize it's probably the opposite. Nintendo was targeting the core market with the Wii U (or at least more of a mix than the Wii) and have failed so far. If anything, this may have Nintendo hopping back over to the casual market with a more motion focused console again.
 

Rlan

Member
Sonic: Lost World is looking like a Titanic bomba. It sold like 3000 copies in Japan on Wii U, and apparently didn't so hot in the UK.

SEGA gonna die
AGAIN

also lol @ angry birds

I don't think any of the Sonic games recently have sold THAT well. I don't think they've been on a Top 10 chart for a while, outside of the Mario & Sonic titles, which came out in November.

Additionally, when Sonic LW was announce they also announced a three game deal - Lost World, Soichi 2014 Olympics and one more unannounced title. Which usually means some co-marketing moolah is involved.

On top of that there's that new Sonic TV show coming out next year I think?
 

Air

Banned
The only way I can see it beating the cube is with price cuts down the road when the heavy hitters are already out. But even than in certain places the price cuts haven't had an effect (hopefully due to the lack of catalogue).
 
How is the worst case scenario 3.7 million a year when the vast majority came at launch? No, worse case scenario is sales barely tick up with 3d world and MK and the system doesn't even sell 10 million units. At this point, 20 million is a pipe dream which no matter how many times I see bad Wii U sales I'm in awe to think about.
 

Deku Tree

Member
It is funny that people keep saying Iwata is toast.
I'm sure Nintendo's investors are pretty happy with the performance of the 2DS-3DS.
Even if the Wii U is a huge BOMBA.
 

Concept17

Member
October reads as a huge anticipation for next-gen.

It is funny that people keep saying Iwata is toast.
I'm sure Nintendo's investors are pretty happy with the performance of the 2DS-3DS.
Even if the Wii U is a huge BOMBA.

Yeah having your market go from 100m to doing worse than the gamecube is just solid for investors.
 
Same here. I look at it from the U.S. side of things, but honestly, I don't see why Mr. Iwata has left certain employees in their current positions at NOA. I actually think one employee is only remaining at NOA, hoping that the ax will hit Mr. Iwata, and he will be promoted to CEO.

I mean, under the current NOA leadership, Amazon.com stopped carrying Nintendo consoles (only now do they carry the 3DS systems, and STILL not the Wii U/2DS systems). A year after the Wii U was released, and Amazon.com doesn't carry the Wii U...only in the United States. Which is supposedly Nintendo's most important home console region, at least based on history and sales.

NOA also had the worst Wii U launch ads, out of all the regions.

Which region has Nintendo had the most trouble getting/keeping third party support/relationships? In the U.S. EA dropped support of the Wii U, first time a cookie-cutter Madden game wasn't released on a Nintendo console in how many years?

Where was NOA's management? I look at NCL, and see them at least building relationships with Capcom, Sega, Namco Bandai and others there...what about NOA?

Where has NOA's management been for much of the last 2 years? The same management that didn't want to support the Wii with 100% developed/published games (Disaster: Day of Crisis, Pandora's Tower, The Last Story)

NOA's management has apparently been the same place their Wii U ads have been, non-existent. Though, they are getting paid, I'm just not sure for what.

NoA has ZERO autonomy since Iwata took over from Yamauchi. NoA cannot do anything without NCL telling them. Nothing. So you can fling all the barbs at NoA you want, there is nothing they can do with how Iwata currently has power centralized at NCL.
 

yon61

Member
It is funny that people keep saying Iwata is toast.
I'm sure Nintendo's investors are pretty happy with the performance of the 2DS-3DS.
Even if the Wii U is a huge BOMBA.

Investors care about profit, and the Wii U is eating up whatever the 3DS creates of it... so no, investors are not happy at all.
 

Sergiepoo

Member
Nintendo didn't abandon it prematurely, their market collapsed around 2009 to 2010. By 2011 and 12 it was in freefall.

The next evolution in motion control like it or not is kinect, and its already here.
I've seen no evidence that the so-called Wii fad wore out, only Nintendo unable to capitalize on the early years of the Wii's success and failing to secure the support of third parties while massively slowing down their own releases creating huge droughts in software. I imagine the casual market just got bored like we did.

I can't comment on the Kinect because I don't know if casual gamers really responded to it and are continuing to respond to it, but I think it was too abstract for most casual gamers, and it's not nearly the flexible control scheme that the Wii remote was.
 
It is funny that people keep saying Iwata is toast.
I'm sure Nintendo's investors are pretty happy with the performance of the 2DS-3DS.
Even if the Wii U is a huge BOMBA.

Investors are never happy with declining revenues and profits. They're not even happy with flat revenues and profits. 3DS and 2DS will have to explode in order to make investors happy, as it will need to not only meet but far surpass DS in order to make up for the Wii U.
 
The weird thing is, with Dreamcast and GameCube, Sega and Nintendo at least tried to heavily market those systems.

With Wii U, Nintendo sort of went "oh shit, mulligan?" at the start of the year, seemed to think that putting the system into virtual hibernation in terms of releases and advertisement for 6 months would help somehow, and then forgot about the advertisement part by the games started to come.

The optimism about some kind of miraculous turnaround seems based in the idea that there's never been a major system whose poor sales could be directly attributed to the company not even trying to sell it for the first year.
 

Opiate

Member
This month highlights for me how Nintendo collapsing is seriously toxic for many third parties. The Lego people, Sega, and many others.

Third parties need to get the fuck off Nintendo platforms. Well, anyone left.

Those games won't do very well on Sony's or Microsoft's systems, though. Lego won't magically be a hit on the PS4Xbone any more than CoD was magically going to be a huge hit on the Wii. Given the reception of Knack and collapse of the Wii U, there just isn't much place left on consoles for Lego/Sonic style games.

Virtually all of Sega's games bombed on PS3/360 last generation. It was catastrophic for them; Golden Axe, Golden Compass, Virtua Fighter 5, Sonic the Hedgehog -- a long list of hugely underperforming titles on those platforms.
 

Steel

Banned
God those vita sales numbers break my heart. Really hope remote play sells the system, it deserves better. I also hope Wii U does better.
 

Guevara

Member
Jefferies Group projects sales trends of 10 million consoles shipped (similar to Dreamcast) over the Wii U's lifespan:

qtqqc6b.png

Y2 data is going to be extremely damning I think. I mean, the past few months were damning too. But when the Y2 is lower than Y1, yikes is that bad.
 

AniHawk

Member
The weird thing is, with Dreamcast and GameCube, Sega and Nintendo at least tried to heavily market those systems.

With Wii U, Nintendo sort of went "oh shit, mulligan?" at the start of the year, seemed to think that putting the system into virtual hibernation in terms of releases and advertisement for 6 months would help somehow, and then forgot about the advertisement part by the games started to come.

The optimism about some kind of miraculous turnaround seems based in the idea that there's never been a major system whose poor sales could be directly attributed to the company not even trying to sell it for the first year.

let's put out a series of web ads for game & wario. yeah, that'll do it.
 
Holy shit at those WiiU numbers.


Damn . . . the whip-lash from the Wii to the WiiU is amazing . . . from the most successful console to a dog.
 

Opiate

Member
Yep, the Wii U has gone from Gamecube "just ride it out" levels to "this is such a disaster that it may need to be killed prematurely" levels.
 

Opiate

Member
It is funny that people keep saying Iwata is toast.
I'm sure Nintendo's investors are pretty happy with the performance of the 2DS-3DS.
Even if the Wii U is a huge BOMBA.

This is not how investment works. Investors don't want to hear that technically the company is not likely to die in the near future, they want to see growth.
 

Tookay

Member
The weird thing is, with Dreamcast and GameCube, Sega and Nintendo at least tried to heavily market those systems.

With Wii U, Nintendo sort of went "oh shit, mulligan?" at the start of the year, seemed to think that putting the system into virtual hibernation in terms of releases and advertisement for 6 months would help somehow, and then forgot about the advertisement part by the games started to come.

The optimism about some kind of miraculous turnaround seems based in the idea that there's never been a major system whose poor sales could be directly attributed to the company not even trying to sell it for the first year.

For a while, it seemed like the strategy was almost "we only have one chance to reintroduce the system, so we'll hold back until the fall and treat it like a new system launch because nobody knows about the system anyway."

... And then November came. With no marketing push to accompany the games that finally arrived.
 

Log4Girlz

Member
Nintendo needs to sell 3 million from now til next year to have a chance of turn-around. I don't anticipate that happening.
 
Yep, the Wii U has gone from Gamecube "just ride it out" levels to "this is such a disaster that it may need to be killed prematurely" levels.

If it can't even sell 200k in November and the same or more in December I'll jump on the they should start investing in a new console immediately.
 
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