This isn’t news to savvy video game enthusiasts, but Nintendo’s Wii U console is a big ol’ flop. The new part of this is that Nintendo has owned up to the console’s failure at a shareholder meeting in Osaka today. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, previously a champion of the struggling game system, told investors that Nintendo will post a loss for the third consecutive year, and they are cutting their Wii U sales forecast for the year by about 70 percent. Additionally, Nintendo had predicted a 100 billion yen profit for this year but now will be posting a 35 billion yen loss.
The Wii U was a challenged system from the day it launched, already in the shadow of upcoming systems from Microsoft and Sony that offered superior technical capabilities and broader ranges of game titles. Nintendo’s already tenuous hold on their market share slipped even more when their rival companies released the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 at the end of 2013, effectively dominating an arena that all but belonged to Nintendo just a few years ago.
Iwata did not detail any corrective measures or solutions for Nintendo’s sales woes, but he did say that “There will be no major management shake-up in the short term.”
