Nintendo's finally throwing in the towel for Wii U, if reports are correct.
Nintendo has previously admitted that it struggled to communicate this console to the market, after the success of the Wii, selling 101 million units worldwide. Many thought it was an added accessory or a peripheral for the Wii, the main reason users were initially averse to purchasing a pricey add-on, when in fact it wasn't as such.
As of the last official calculation, Nintendo was able to sell 13.36 million Wii U consoles globally, a stark distance from its hefty forecast of 100 million units. The final count is expected to hover just slightly more, with the production halt coming in this Friday flatlining sales altogether.
Japanese gaming site Nikkei (in Japanese) and Eurogamer were among the first sites to report the eventual halt of the console, citing multiple sources for the validity.
The Wii U was first released November 2012, to an initially successful first retail run, managing to sell a couple of million units, a figure which has since steadily dipped, with occasional upticks when first-party titles would spring up.
At the end of March 2017, Nintendo has forecasted that it will have shipped 800,000 Wii U consoles, 560,000 of which have already been shipped by the end of September.
The Wii U was the successor to the Nintendo Wii, launched back in 2006 which introduced motion control in gaming. The Wii was a massive success for the company despite being considerably underpowered by its contemporaries, Sony's PlayStation 3 and Microsoft's Xbox 360.
The Wii, despite being a major success, became past its prime since consoles had very little shelf life as technology flourished progressively. The Wii U was supposed to replace the Wii altogether, but it failed to do so, unable to shift perception that it was a brand new console instead of simply being an appendix to the existing Wii console.
Nintendo has not issued any comment regarding the reports, but rumors of the halt began surfacing in March, prompting a spokesperson for the company to tell IT media that the rumors were "not an announcement from the company." Reports that have surfaced recently, however, suggest the halt to be accurate.
If there's a silver lining in the alleged production halt, it's this: the company may now attune itself wholly to the development of its next flagship hybrid console, the Nintendo Switch, announced late October.
The halt drops the Wii U in the priorities list for Nintendo, so they could lay finishing touches on the Switch as it nears its promised launch this March. Before that, however, Nintendo's planning to provide more information about the console come Jan. 12.
