Hoping to fly off the shelves once again

Nintendo's recently announced sales figures (covering 1st April to 30th June) for Wii U made grim reading, re-emphasizing the stalled momentum of the system and further explaining the company's repeated message that it would be the second half of the year that would be of the most significance. With few notable releases, sales simply dropped away, with the most alarming figure arguably being the fact that just 10,000 units were reported as sold in regions outside of North America and Japan.

One set of statistics cited by MCV, as part of a wider look at the system's prospects, reveal the sales improvements brought by the high-profile Wii U price cuts introduced by Amazon UK and Asda in recent weeks. The aggressive pricing attracted a lot of attention, but according to data from GfK Chart-Track, Amazon's price cut of £100 added just 667 sales above the previous full-priced week, while Asda's similar cut attracted just 250 extra sales; these are UK figures, specifically, and interesting as the price cuts received plenty of coverage in the press and on social networks.

These sales are clearly very low, and demonstrate clearly that a price cut alone isn't sufficient to prompt a sudden surge of sales; these price cuts arrived during a notable lull in high-profile game releases. That's an area that Nintendo is taking on with gusto for the remainder of the year, and these statistics perhaps reflect why the old saying "software sells hardware" is trotted out so regularly; price cuts alone, in the case of the UK at least, do little without the games.

The games are coming of course, though gamers can debate the merits of the strengths and weakness of the lineup on the way. Nintendo UK and all of the regional teams will be hoping that, once the library is spruced up with plenty of exclusives, numbers like these will become a thing of the past.

[source mcvuk.com]