One copy of the Wii U was sold in September 2023, the first sale since 2022 and more than 5 years after the end of the console’s life. One of Nintendo’s worst commercial failures.
Forget the PS5 Slim or Nintendo’s next console, someone in the United States bought a Wii U in September 2023. You read that right, more than five years after production of the Nintendo console stopped, someone bought a new copy.
A collector’s purchase
The Wii U was launched in 2012 by Nintendo, a year before the PS4 and Xbox One generation. Due to its confusing name, the lack of interesting games from the manufacturer at launch and a price that was probably too high, the Wii U was an unspeakable failure for the Japanese giant.
You only need to take a look at the sales of machines on the manufacturer’s latest generations to see this. Where the Nintendo Switch sold 129 million copies or the Wii 101 million copies, the Wii U only found 13 million interested. Even Microsoft’s Xbox One, an American failure and the worst generation to lose according to Phil Spencer, did three times better than the Wii U.
Most of the great games released on Wii U have been ported or remastered to Nintendo Switch a long time ago. The console therefore has very little interest unless you want to collect all the brand’s consoles.
Like the reminder Numerama, it is all the more strange since the Wii U online store, the eShop, has been closed since March 27, 2023. There is not much more to conclude about this statistical anomaly. We hope that the person in question did not make a mistake when making their purchase.