I'm going to take this as satire. Please do, too. There's just too many holes in his logic. The Onion has competition.
Discontinuing video-game consoles is far from unprecedented. Sega released, and then rapidly abandoned, four consoles between 1992 and 1999, before ultimately exiting the hardware business entirely. Nintendo (NASDAQOTH: NTDOY ) has had its own failure -- it gave up on the Virtual Boy after just seven months.
Is the Wii U next? The console's first year on the market has been abysmal -- Nintendo hasshipped just 4 million Wii U units, far short of its own expectations. After cutting the price, Nintendo is now selling the Wii U at a loss, and sales are unlikely to improve in the face of rising competition from Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT ) and Sony (NYSE: SNE ) .
The Wii U has been a total failure
The failure of the Wii U is no secret. Originally, Nintendo had expected to sell 5 million consoles by last March -- but by the end of September, Nintendo had shipped fewer than 4 million units. In an effort to juice sales, Nintendo cut the Wii U's price by $50 in late August, leading to a 200% sales jump in September. But when the base number is so low, large percentage increases look better than they really are. Even with the spike in sales, Nintendo sold just 300,000 consoles from July through September.Nintendo's management sti…
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Edited by grahamf, 10 November 2013 - 08:38 PM.
