Today's column was about the Wii U schedule.
Astounding. Wii U's soft software totals in the face of 39 releases by mid-March makes the average very low. Now obviously NSMBU is going to take up a large amount of that depressed/ing total, so per title sales are ridiculously low. I don't know. Maybe Wii U launched with more filler/shovelware than most consoles do coming from the Wii, which would leave more sales to average across the others, but it's still low. I had high hopes for AC3 and BOII at Wii U launch since it was the most significant traditional game third-party support Nintendo had received on home consoles in probably 5 years, but they apparently aren't (relatively) lighting up the charts. Still think that was somewhat due to poorly planned system release timing by Nintendo. They just
had to have the system available by the time AC3 launched, which would make it available for BOII's release, as well, and they skipped both game launches.
I know it's a launch system, so # of systems sold is going to keep sales down, and the discussion on traditional system attach rate at launch, etc. Still, the total software sales is very low, especially considering the raw # of games already available. Nintendo simply
had to make the AC3 and BOII launch dates, and they didn't. Very disappointing. Was disappointing when they announced the launch date being after those two game launches and continues to be disappointing with the apparent sales results for those two tentpole third-party releases on the system (i.e. only Zombi U > 100K as of Dec with 890K systems sold).