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Nintendo is deliberately slowing the release of first party Wii U titles to help extend the console’s sales into 2013.
That’s the admission of boss Satoru Iwata who has told investors that the machine is guaranteed to do well at launch – the challenge, he believes, is maintaining any potential sales spike.
If you look at how pre-orders are doing at the moment, it is not an exaggeration to say that Wii U is sure to sell well in this holiday season,” he stated. But we realise the biggest challenge is to make sure that Wii U sells well even in the next year after the holiday season, and we are working on that too.
Nintendo tends to release too many titles at the launch of a hardware system and as a result suffers a drop in new games for quite some time after launch, and for the Wii U launch, we are being very careful not to let it happen.”
Instead, Nintendo is letting third parties shoulder more of the responsibility for generating hype during the launch window with Nintendo ready to pick up the baton and roll with it into the New Year.
Fortunately, third-party publishers overseas are launching many titles for us this time, and we were able to push back the release of some of the titles that we had originally intended to release as launch titles until next year,” he added.
We will continue to supply software to provide new content that consumers will talk about even after January. The combination of these two things is what we think will keep our momentum going after January next year.”
