In a move that may be set to backfire in a big way, Nintendo President & CEO Satoru Iwata has admitted that Nintendo is intentionally holding back some specific Wii U launch titles in order to ensure that 2013’s sales record holds steady well into the year.
In the investors Q&A, he said that “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, as many of you are probably thinking. But we realize 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. 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.”
How about that? Do you think gamers are going to be thrilled about being made to wait for certain titles they’d intended to play over the holidays? All told, there’s a method to Nintendo’s madness, and it makes sense from a business point of view—they’re attempting to avoid a revisit to the 3DS’s bleak period—but whether it will pan out in terms of continuing goodwill from consumers is another thing entirely. In fact, it can be argued that perhaps they shouldn’t have revealed this little tidbit so readily to the public… time will soon tell.
