Wii U sells well
Despite a bumpy take-off, analysts have declared the launch of the Wii U a success and some believe it will be sold out for months after the Christmas rush.
Reports of freezing errors, random hackings and a THQ developer calling the console “horrible” and “slow” rained on the Wii U parade a little bit, but EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich says the launch was still a success for Nintendo.
“The Nintendo Wii-U launch was a success. There were issues. Issues that are common among hardware launches and Nintendo should address them over time.”
Divnich also says Nintendo will have no problem shifting Wii U consoles during the holiday period.
“Nintendo will have a successful holiday season, as they always do. I have no concerns about the Wii-U’s success through the holidays.”
Even more optimistic is Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter, who says sales will be very high regardless of the technical issues.
“I don’t think this has much impact on the launch, and continue to expect launch quantities to be sold out, and re-orders to remain sold out through March.”
These expectations are unsurprising, and even THQ have released a statement clarifying the statement from one of their staff that the Wii U is “horrible”.
THQ representative Huw Beynon expanded on the original comment made by chief technical officer Oles Shishkovtsov.
“It’s a very CPU intensive game. I think it’s been verified by plenty of other sources…that the CPU on Wii U on the face of it isn’t as fast as some of the other consoles out there. Lots of developers are finding ways to get around that because of other interesting parts of the platform.”
Although THQ is clearly on damage control, others in the industry have backed up the statement from Shishkovtsov including Battlefield 3 lead designer Gustav Halling who tweeted that he was “annoyed” Nintendo “don’t think ahead at all”.
“This is also what I been hearing within the industry, too bad since it will shorten its life a lot when new gen starts,” he said.
It might be slow, but it’s selling like hot-cakes.
What do you guys think – is the Wii U an ill-thought out, mid-generation console, or will it become a standard like its predecessor? Let us know below.
