Sales are everything, especially software sales in the eye of developers.
The 2013 DICE Summit the first time in a while that developers could get together and chat about the latest topics in the video game industry, one of which is the Wii U. But according to Mario Wynands, co-founder of Sidhe, just about nobody had something nice to say about Nintendo's latest hardware. He shared in a post on NeoGAF:
At DICE, nobody has been talking about the new Wii U projects they have started, only the Wii U projects that have just been cancelled.Platform is in serious trouble.
Wynands was asked by several forumgoers how the Wii U's salty launch compares to what the PlayStation 3 dealt with back in 2006, to which he replied that developers were far more patient with Sony. He even shared that one developer had a launch title for the Wii U that was expected to sell over one-million units durings its lifetime, but so far has barely made it into the five-digits. He said:
Pubs and devs never recoiled from PS3 like they seem to be with Wii U (though this is anecdotal). There was always the confidence that the numbers would get there over time with PS3. I'm not sensing that with Wii U.I had a data point yesterday at lunch with a high budget Wii U game that was hoping to sell "millions" over time. It only managed "tens of thousands".
Software sales are in the red, and the hype for the announcement of "real next-gen consoles" has completely overshadowed Wii U's one-year lead. Nintendo is now in a position where it has to decide if doing a price drop along with an Ambassador Program to keep early adopters from fuming. It's a reasonable prospect given the climate, but Nintendo is already taking a loss on each console sold, and it doesn't have the capital to afford heavy losses like Sony did with the PlayStation 3's salvation.
At this point, the Wii U is in desperate need for more games, but few are in sight. Nintendo's overconfidence may have just cost it greatly. and if anything now is the perfect time for Sony to strike.
