Nintendo shared its third quarter financial results yesterday, slashing their sales forecast for Wii U whilst revealing that 3.06 million units had been sold during the two months since launch.
Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter believes that such poor performance is due to the fact that the Wii U “doesn’t capture the imagination” of the Wii.
“I always thought Nintendo’s Wii U software forecast made no sense,” Pachter stated to NowGamer.
“They initially guided 24 million, are taking that down to 16 million, which is a 4:1 software attach rate. That’s reasonable, especially given that the installed base is 3 million hardware units now and the guidance implies they need to ship only 4.31 million more software units.”
Yet, Nintendo’s disappointment with the console’s performance at retail won’t improve until they cut the price.
“The hardware guidance is disappointing, and there isn’t really anything that will get hardware moving other than a price cut. I think they got it wrong with this console, it just doesn’t capture the imagination the way that the Wii did.”
With Microsoft and Sony rumoured to reveal and potentially release new consoles this year, Pachter believes that the Wii U’s future is looking bleak.
“The Wii U is not going to be very competitive if Sony and Microsoft launch comparable consoles at comparable prices,” Pachter continued. “The early weakness will cause many third party publishers to re-think support for the Wii U, and we might not see much support at holiday 2013.”
Pachter: Nintendo “got it wrong” with Wii U
