Wii U sales in Japan paint rocky picture for Nintendo

Sales statistics for a single country never accurately portray how well a company is doing for hardware and software, but in the case of the Wii U, Japanese sales are a great indicator for the health of a console. The future of the console in Japan seems stagnant now that Christmas as over, as the new console racked up 433,000 sales in Japan during the week before Christmas, but sales have slipped down to just 122,000 as we head into 2013.

Just how bad is that, performance-wise? Well, putting the whole thing into perspective, the nearly 8 year old PSP sold 58,000 units during the same week. Ouch. It seems the Wii U has currently reached the point of stagnation for Japanese consumers, as the console launched on December 8th for Japanese consumers. That’s less than a full month of availability and sales are already dropping.

This just goes to show that Mario titles alone cannot carry the day for Nintendo; many promised games like Pikmin 3 and Rayman Legends have been delayed to the point where most consumers are probably waiting to purchase the console until their favorite games are available to play. Keep in mind these sales stats reflect Japan only and North American sales stats might paint an entirely different picture.

[via BGR]