Nintendo pushing Wii U titles until next year to keep sales up

Following last weeks Investors Q&A, Nintendo President and CEO Satoru Iwata has revealed that Nintendo are deliberately holding back games from 2012 to keep sales up in the future.

“If you look at how pre-orders are doing at the moment, it is not an exaggeration to say that Wii U is sure to sell well in this holiday season, as many of you are probably thinking. But we realize the biggest challenge is to make sure that Wii U sells well even in the next year after the holiday season, and we are working on that too,” he told investors.

“Nintendo tends to release too many titles at the launch of a hardware system and as a result suffers a drop in new games for quite some time after launch, and for the Wii U launch, we are being very careful not to let it happen. Fortunately, third-party publishers overseas are launching many titles for us this time, and we were able to push back the release of some of the titles that we had originally intended to release as launch titles until next year.”

Iwata also hopes that Nintendo Land will get some of the same excitement that Wii Sports brought to the Wii launch. “While we have no way of telling whether Nintendo Land will do what Wii Sports did, we are hoping to promote word-of-mouth communication among consumers, and at the same time, we will continue to supply software to provide new content that consumers will talk about even after January. The combination of these two things is what we think will keep our momentum going after January next year.”

With third parties actually coming to the party for the Wii U launch the ‘lack’ of Nintendo titles at launch isn’t so noticeable. But we hope Nintendo are quick to release games early next year, people are always craving new content.