Nintendo surprised everyone last month when they revealed that the Wii U console will be sold at a loss initially. This makes it the first Nintendo home console in a long time, possibly the first time ever, that’s sold at a loss.
But it’s not that bad, according to Nintendo’s Reggie Fils-Aime, who said in a recent interview that while the company is losing some money on each Wii U sold, it only takes one first party game to be sold in order for the Wii U to become profitable. He said:
“As soon as we get the consumer to buy one piece of software, then that entire transaction becomes profit positive”
He added that the business model is still to “drive the install base”, and then to sell as many games as possible with a strong games to console attach ratio. GameStop recently reported that over 500,000 Wii U consoles were pre-ordered, and 1.2 million games, which comes out to 2.4 games per console. That’s a really strong number when we’re talking about pre-orders alone, and it doesn’t include Nintendo Land.
Nintendo has several first party games for the Wii U, the biggest one being New Super Mario Bros U. We’ll have our NSMB U review up very soon, so stay tuned!
