Nintendo may have overestimated the number of Wii U consoles they planned to sell by more than 90 million units, Nintendo's president Tatsumi Kimishima has candidly revealed.
Kimishima revealed the existence of this wildly inaccurate prediction at an investor meeting recently. The prediction is said to have come from an unnamed salesperson at the company, a prediction made just before the Wii U was released in 2012.
"In an internal sales representative meeting, someone projected that we would sell close to 100 million Wii U systems worldwide," said Kimishima.
As of March, Nintendo has only sold 12.8 million Wii U consoles worldwide.
There was solid reasoning behind the prediction though. Nintendo's previous console, the Wii, sold more than 102 million units worldwide, and many in the company expected the Wii's successor to do just as well.
But as Kimishima explains, he wasn't one of those who thought the Wii U would be an automatic success, not without the right sales pitch.
"I said that, since the Wii had already sold so well, we need to clearly explain the attraction of the Wii U if we are to get beyond that and sell the new system, and that this would be no easy task," said Kimishima.
And no easy task it proved to be, with the Wii U languishing in a very distant third place behind console rivals the PS4 and Xbox One.
Kimishima will hope that Nintendo's next console, codenamed the NX, will have a better launch and marketing strategy when it launches in March next year.
For now, Nintendo can be content with its recent launch of the iOS/Android game 'Pokemon GO'. The huge success of the game on launch has helped Nintendo stock record a 50% rise since the game was launched late last week.
[Via Fortune and Nintendo]
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