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Nintendo Giving up on Wii U: Analyst

Posted by: , 13:47 AEST, Sun April 19, 2015

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Nintendo may have moved on from the Wii U to concentrate all efforts on its next console, the Nintendo NX
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VentureBeat Insight analyst Stewart Rogers believes that Nintendo has already given up on the Wii U, and has started putting all their efforts into their upcoming console - codenamed the Nintendo NX.

Rogers says that release figures for Wii U clearly shows that Nintendo has all but given up on their flagship console.

"While the Wii U has around 380 console exclusive titles, the majority were launched 2013," says Rogers. "Fewer exclusives were made available in 2014. In this respect, the Wii U is on the wrong side of the bell curve and Nintendo appear to have been winding it down already."

Rogers' believe is backed up by the lack of any new Wii U game announcements during the most recent Nintendo Direct broadcast (Nintendo Direct is Nintendo's official online broadcast stream), although the relatively close proximity to E3 might partially explain the lack of any new announcements. 

VentureBeat's Mike Minotti has also pointed to several other signs that the Wii U's days are numbered.

The most obvious sign relates to the fact that a new console has already been officially announced by Nintendo, despite the Wii U only 2.5 years old, a very young age for a console (the Wii U was released 6 years after the original Wii).

The delay of Zelda for the Wii U to 2016 and possibly making it a cross-platform release on both the Wii U and the NX, Minotti says, also seems to suggest that the end is nigh for the Wii U. This type of intentional delay isn't without precedent - Nintendo did the same with the previous Zelda game, Twilight Princess, which was originally slated for the GameCube, only for it to be delayed and released simultaneously on the GameCube and the then new Wii console.

"2016 could be a very slow, and ultimately fatal year for the Wii U," concludes Minotti.


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