Nintendo President Satoru Iwata admitted that sales of the Wii U have not matched the insane demand for the Wii in an interview with Reuters released Monday. He does say that the new console is selling steadily though.
"At the end of the Christmas season, it wasn't as though stores in the U.S. had no Wii U left in stock, as it was when Wii was first sold in that popular boom. But sales are not bad, and I feel it's selling steadily," Iwata told Reuters.
The NPD sales results for December have not been released yet but the the November NPDs revealed 425,000 Wii U consoles sold for the launch month. One analyst called the sales of the gaming device "slightly disappointing" so far and noted that GameStop sales did not meet expectations.
Iwata also noted the difficulties Nintendo encountered producing two different versions of the Wii U.
"It was the first time Nintendo released two models of the game console at the same time ... and I believe there was a challenge with balancing this. Specifically, inventory levels for the premium, deluxe package was unbalanced as many people wanted that version and couldn't find it," he said."
The Deluxe version of the Wii U comes with 32GB of storage space, a free copy of "Nintendo Land" and special rebates for purchasing content online. The Basic model only comes with 8GB of storage space which really only has less than half that available.
Nintendo does face some challenges with the Wii U for 2013 as both Microsoft and Sony are expected to launch their next-gen consoles and it appears that Valve is jumping into the console game with the Steam Box. For its part, Nintendo is promising "fantastic" games to come in 2013.
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Via: Reuters
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