Actually, though, when I look at that chart, I see something else. What Nintendo wants us to take away from this chart is that it introduced digital sales of its major game software in the second half of the fiscal year, and proceeded to make nearly as much money in that second half as it had in any previous year. Nintendo has been belatedly attempting to build up its digital game sales business in anticipation of it being the primary driver of sales one day in the (near?) future, and posted mildly encouraging results at this investors' briefing:

'The point I am trying to get across is that currently it is more challenging to sell packaged software for around $50-$60.' No kidding! Some of us may even have said in the past that you might want to try not building your entire business around that, in case it all collapses one day. Will this generation shift, too, prove more complicated than expected?īack to Iwata. Noteworthy: Kotaku reported recently that Microsoft, too, is lagging behind where it wanted to be in development of games for the new Xbox console. So it really didn't matter how many other game publishers explicitly spelled out their issues with high-def game creation, Nintendo made the same miscalculation and is suffering the consequences.

Thing is, everybody else found this out in 2006. And just like every other game developer found out, it always requires more resources than you think. You see, Nintendo, by its own design, was the last major gamemaker on Earth to not have any experience whatsoever with creating high-definition games. 'The reason for the delayed release of our first-party titles was the fact that completing the games released at the same time as the launch of Wii U required more development resources than expected, so some staff members from development teams working on other titles had to help complete them,' Iwata said. U, without which Wii U could not have been launched at all.

So why did Nintendo delay all of those games? At a recent Q&A session with investors, Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata dropped the bomb: He had to delay these games, he said, because he had to pull development staff off of them to help finish NintendoLand and New Super Mario Bros. It worked in the case of my household, and evidently in others as well. Hence, at least a stopgap measure of Virtual Console: With no retail releases to speak of, may as well get some downloadable classics on there to generate buzz and cause people to turn their machines on. Meanwhile, you've still got three and a half million suckers who bought a Wii U who have nothing to do with it. Wii U sales slumped terribly after the holidays, and massive delays of almost its entire slate of game releases have left it without any reasonable path to success for a very long time. Quite frankly I don't even think we'd have gotten this initial smattering of Virtual Console games on Wii U had Nintendo not been at a desperation point. I've been beating that drum since 2006 and the skin's about to break. Ryan Payton, formerly of Metal Gear Solid and Halo fame and now of the indie game Republique, offered that Nintendo could do something similar but by looking inward rather than outward: Make Wii U a 'Nintendo paradise,' he said, a one-stop shop for Nintendo's entire history. On a recent 8-4 Play podcast, I said that Nintendo should immediately institute some kind of App Store-like development environment, mobilizing the combined efforts of the world's indie developers to generate lots and lots of Wii U content more cheaply.

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