Btw, I'm wondering what's up with the gloom and doom on this NPD thread for the Wii U compared to last month. Were people actually expecting sales to go up this month? I'm just wondering. Do sales typically go up in October from September? It is possible that GTA V and Pokemon/3DS sales cannibalized all other sales this month...
Was the idea that most of the Wii U titles coming out this year came out at the end of October?
So what titles are we looking at for October on the Wii U?
Assassin's Creed IV
Sonic Lost World
Wii Party U
Batman: Arkham Origins
Deus Ex: Human Revolution Director's Cut (which I heard was barely stocked anywhere for any platform)
Wind Waker HD
Skylanders?
Was the idea that the price cut in its 2nd month plus these (mostly multiplatform) games would increase the sales? Considering the sales of even the most popular multiplats probably didn't cross 800k across 3-5 platforms, I really doubt the Wii U sales for those titles would suddenly make people buy a Wii U. I think pretty much only a special GTA Wii U DLC may have done something.
Anyways, if the Wii U is now suddenly doomed, nothing has changed since last month. Thus it was doomed last month by the logic that the price cut didn't do enough.
People are also pretty foolish if you think Nintendo could suddenly decide to discontinue the Wii U and release a new console at some point soon. If they have a backup plan, this plan should have already been in motion quite a while back. If they don't, they'll do something to minimize losses on the Wii U, while attempting to pick up some type of steam in a cheap manner, and that's pretty much it. Development of Mario Kart is definitely a sunk cost, so the question is whether the sales would justify its release.
Btw, CoffeeGames, I do agree about NoA having issues. However, I think you don't happen to realize that there is a significant technical portion of NoA that does work. At the minimum, there is the Treehouse translation teams, and I've heard of non-game related software projects that folks at NoA were doing, like working on the 3DS SDK years back. Also there's a really good gamasutra article about Nintendo attempting to market the GameCube and how stupid they honestly seemed at the time. They didn't even think of advertising Resident Evil 4 along with their system b/c it was a third party game, even though it was probably one of the best non-Nintendo exclusives for the GameCube. Instead they did weird things like taking the GameCube to clubs.... Reggie was the VP of marketing at the time, thus I bring it up =).
I think there's something to the fact that Iwata has consistently said "getting the 3DS to be a huge success in the west is our biggest priority". If you look at Nintendo's current actions, they basically sabotaged the Wii U in October to promote only the 3DS and Pokemon. And for the 3DS/2DS, it clearly seemed to work. Now why exactly did Nintendo do that though? That I'm not really sure.
My guess is Iwata is trying to making the 3DS really successful in the West so that the 3DS goes on autopilot and sells pretty well. Then they could focus a lot more resources on the Wii U. However, if the Wii U simply dies over the holidays, I'm not entirely sure what Nintendo would do with their console business even if the portables are doing tremendously well... I guess technically making the 3DS more successful makes Nintendo more money than pouring money into the dying Wii U, which would technically make sense at least in the short-term.