Nintendo has announced that three of its biggest Wii U titles last Fall each have sold over 1 million copies worldwide.
This doesn’t come as a huge surprise, as all three games were highly anticipated, and not only did they each sell over a million copies, they most definitely attracted a lot of new Wii U buyers as well.
Both Zelda Wind Waker HD and Super Mario 3D World were well-received by both critics and gamers, and are must-have titles for any Wii U owner, coupled with another 2014 Wii U hit: Pikmin 3. Wii Party U, on the other hand, wasn’t much liked by critics, but it offered Party gamers and Wii U owners a lot of fun, nevertheless. Even if we have seen most of the mini-games before.
Zelda Wind Waker HD has especially been great for Nintendo. Not only did the game result in a sales spike for the Wii U console, it only took Nintendo 6 months to port the old GameCube game to the Wii U in 1080p HD.
While Nintendo delivered the great news about the software sales numbers, they did add this to the statement to shareholders:
“While these titles each sold over one million units, the Wii U business as a whole was not able to recover fully, and the global sales of the Wii U hardware and software reached only 2.41 million and 15.96 million units respectively”.
The report from Nintendo added that the Wii U had a “negative impact on Nintendo’s profits”, mainly due to the price cut. While Nintendo isn’t doing well financially, they did announce a stock buyback program, where they plan to buy back 10 million shares. Which is a good sign of how they see the company’s value in the future.
Company president Satoru Iwata recently announced a new business strategy for Nintendo, utilizing different platform to spread its brand and content.
Source (Nintendo PDF)
