The PS4 Has Already Outsold the Wii U in the UK
I don’t want to sound like I’m slagging off Nintendo but this news should really worry some people back in Japan. In its first weekend on the market in the UK, the PlayStation 4 is already the top-selling next-gen console having beaten both the Xbox One and Wii U.
An industry source told Eurogamer that the PS4’s launch weekend saw Sony’s new console sell around 250,000 units. Over its launch weekend, the Xbox One sold 100,000 units but has climbed up to 170,000 units by the end of this past weekend.
The troubling news for Nintendo, whose Wii U console has been out for over a year now, as their next-gen offering has only moved 150,000 units. That’s 20,000 less than a week-and-a-half of Xbox One sales and three days of PS4 sales.
On a worldwide scale, the news just gets worse for Nintendo. Bloomberg reports that the first nine months of Wii U sales were less than the first 24 hours of sales of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
Speaking of worldwide scale, while the total Wii U and Xbox One units sold to date hasn’t been released by either manufacturer or analysts, Sony has revealed that they’ve sold 2.1 million units as of December 1st. We do know that the Xbox One sold over 1 million units over the course of its first 24 hours on the market but we don’t have any more detail beyond that.
While we knew that when the dust cleared on next-gen launches, it would be the PS4 and Xbox One well out in front of Nintendo. What I didn’t ever give thought to is that the Wii U’s lifetime sales would be eclipsed in a matter of days.
Considering the popularity of the Wii and relatively low price of a Wii U, you would have thought that Nintendo would have a rather large and passionate base that would buy the Wii U. A lack of launch and launch window titles to get people interested in the system before everyone’s attention was swallowed by Sony and Microsoft’s next-gen offerings would have gone a long way to selling more Wii Us. Now, I’m not sure that Nintendo will catch up enough to be considered a major player in this generation.
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Posted on December 4, 2013, in Games and tagged Business of Gaming, Nintendo, Wii U. Bookmark the permalink. 2 Comments.
et geekera 
Can’t honestly say this comes as much of a surprise… The pre-launch marketing was pretty poor, in fact I’d say a lot of people thought it was just a tablet preripheral for the Wii.
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each console has its year
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