Wii U Pre-Orders Enjoy a Healthy Boost Following Gamescom

I'm really happy to hear this piece of news. I wish everyone knows how awesome the Wii U is!

I've said it recently I'm starting to see a growing trend towards the Wii U. A lot of people are starting to get sick of the current trend the gaming market is heading down. The problem is 3rd parties are long gone and Nintendo is floating this boat All by themselves. Thankfully Indies have been there to help fill the gaps out but no one buys a system based off of indie titles!

Hey look, good news.

I see no connection to Gamescom here. It's only related to the Hyrule Warriors Direct + announcement of the Limited Edition in Europe.

Percentage boost from what? There's no context with just percentages with no numbers attached to them. You can't get a story from that, I recall Zelda HD having that percentages with no numbers and look what happened there.

The numbers themselves could be anything.

Good news but honestly only three titles in the top ten are coming to Wii U and just having percentages never helps as the pre orders/sales could have been tiny to begin with so a percentage jump is an insignificant amount more in the end.

Edit: essentially ninja'd by @Punished_Boss.

@Spoony_Tech True Indie titles dont have the muscle to carry a system, but if were lucky some of these little acorns may well grow into big oaks. What Nintendo needs to do with some of the better indie groups is support them into becoming bigger and better companies and develop fresh new 3rd party support and mabey even buy a few new first party teams.

Sigh. After two years of absence with not much buzz surrounding its wake up call, (maybe I missed something) It (Edit: and by It I mean Project CARS) came in first?... whatever....(Edit: good for Project CARS I guess.) Awesome for the WiiiU to come in first in preorders list.

Heh, though what do I know about percentages?

@Captain_Toad Um that isn't what the article is saying.

Slightly confused about Rise of the Tomb Raider seeing increased pre order numbers... Wasn't it revealed at Gamescon?

@AJWolfTill Was announced at E3.

@Jazzer94 oopsie. I meant to type in Project CARS being in first even though there's not much hype (maybe I missed something) going 4 it. My apologies.

@Spoony_Tech - Wow, thats almost exactly word for word what I was going to write.

Year got off to a bad start, the Wii U gets some good E3 press coverage to go along with some new games releasing, other consoles are slowing; but for every good news beat like this we get no AC game, no COD game, its Nintendo or nothing, which may not be enough to get people to buy a Wii U. (Title could really use the word "games" in it.)

I wasn't going to mention indies - Im sick of indie articles - but I think any sane person would have to agree indies can be great fun to play but they arent selling any systems.

@rjejr Great minds think a like!

@Aviator @AJWolfTill - Was announced at E3, but declared a timed X1 exclusive at Gamescon. So the bump is likely from insane X1 owners who wont buy a multiplat but jump on a timed exclusive. Im kidding, but Im not.

@Punished_Boss Exactly. This means nothing unless we see some actual figures. Wii U game pre-orders could have increased by the biggest percentage, but still be way lower in number, compared to the PS4 and XBone.

@Captain_Toad Ah okay but keep in mind there has been a lot of hype for Project Cars in the racing communities which have sizable fanbases on PS and Xbox so it's not to surprising that the game will move units.

Nonsense article. (Kind of thing advertisers and marketing people use).

Way to do it would be to get data from a representative sample of independent retailers use that to give a reasonable estimate of the situation across all retailers by extrapolating. (Using actual numbers). Cannot remember the name of it but you use a certain number of sample means to estimate the population mean. (It is maybe 20 mins work once you have the data).

If you can get a yes or no from somebody at the big retailers. (Get any no's don't publish get more samples).

After that percentages between the estimated numbers of preorders for PS4/Xbone/Wii U might be reasonable.

@unrandomsam - Agreed.

This is a bit like those articles that state there has been a "500% sales increase" or similar when in fact the sales were so low prior that the 500% number is insignificant.

This is marketing babble. Something that MS are masters of.

@Spoony_Tech - "great minds"

The bug-eyed dumbfounded guy and the girl with the hand-puppets.
We're like Plato and Aristotle

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bzxWIL6HElI

@rjejr I love me some Honeymooners! Seen every episode at some points in my life. They pretty much all end the same though lol!

Hmm. I'd be thinking that SSB U got a bigger boost.

Percent is a single word.
Per cent would mean "for each cent".

Better software lineup = better sales. You can only find certain experiences on Nintendo platforms... hence why people are becoming more interested.

Last month Billy sold 100 games. This month, he sold 118. In percentage, how much increase has he seen month on month?

All this shows is more people are willing to order a game a month in advance than 2 months in advance. Also, I think people are more likely to order a game after seeing a little bit more information about it's quality and release. Imagine how many more pre orders Bayonetta 2 would get if we got a release date....

All I read was that Nintendo fans are more likely to do silly things such as pre-order games.

Sony and Microsoft need more exclusives if they expect to win this generation. Yes PS4 is ahead but it's likely to end up like Vita if Sony doesn't continue to release games

I love the name "slightly mad studios".

Good news though I agree we had numbers of copies than percentage. Today I do my part after work by finally pre ordering Bayo 2, HW, 2 copies of Smash 3ds, and Smash Wii U.

@Mega719 They don't and that analogy is wrong and based on nothing. Wii U lives on exclusives has that panned out well?

Wait, is there even a preorder available for the WiiU Project Cars yet??

@Punished_Boss if people would actually buy them yes they would, you can just buy 3rd parties on another system that wouldn't help sales of that particular one if that is what it relies on. Plus most games aren't even reviewed well on PS4 and X1 even highly anticipated ones like Theif and MGS5. By comparison 3rd parties on Wii U do much better

@Mega719 "By comparison 3rd parties on Wii U do much better"

Yeah no.

@Mega719 I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at? How can third parties be doing better on Wii U if their existence is fading?

MGS 5 got slaughtered because it was a prologue/demo release priced too high, besides that nothing was wrong with it, TPP will tell a different story. Theif was a typical Square Enix murder story.

@Danny429 There called like that cause they made wiiu owners slightly mad with the project cars delay. Ahh you see what i did there friendo.

I pre-ordered Smash U, Yoshi's Wooly World, and Splatoon after E3. Do I get a Nintendo cookie?
Normally I don't pre-order games, but ordering those 3 gave me $60 of credit so I can get Zelda U for free.

Still annoys me that third party companies are giving so much support to xbox one and it's the worst selling of the 3 main consoles regardless of the time they have been available

Good for Wii U... but I will get it on 2015. Still busy on my 3DS and PC

@PinkSpider Probably whenever somebody threatens to they get a pay off to not.

@vamkar

"I'm going to sound like a fan boy here, but in my own personal opinion, the Wii U is the best console I've ever owned."

I wouldn't say it's my favorite console (imo, that belongs to SNES), but it certainly is a very good one. It unreasonably became a punching bag, but I think people are starting to see the value in it (off-tv play is a win for families). I personally don't get as much time to play games, so even though there's dry spells, I usually have something to play via backlog.

What's encouraging is that ever since MK8 dropped, the Wii U has been selling on par or better than Xbone. That's according vgcharz.com so take that for what it's worth.

@PinkSpider Install base/weekly sales don't matter, if there's a market for your games is a entirely different question.

@Byuu Yeah, I wasn't even sure Nintendo was there because of no News from them, not that there was really any to expect.

@Spoony_Tech Couldn't have said it better. I'd love SOME 3rd party games on Wii U, I do however have my PS3 for that. Main thing is to keep the boat afloat long enough, SSB and Zelda U will bring more people around, THEN the 3rd parties will come too.

@midnafanboy punny punny!

@Spoony_Tech - "They pretty much all end the same though lol!"

They kiss and live happily ever after. It's the way every story ever written ends. Well except for Shakespeare, then everybody dies.

@Spoony_Tech I absolutely agree with you, i fully believe a year from now it will be the no.1 system. In the last two weeks six of my friends have bought systems.