Wii U ‘sure to sell well’ this holiday season, says Iwata

Nintendo president and CEO Satoru Iwata has no doubt that the Wii U will sell out like hot cakes come this holiday season. Speaking to investors in a Q&A following its financial release last week, Iwata made note of the console's impressive pre-order numbers.

"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," he said.

Although he's confident heading into the launch of the Wii U, Iwata also acknowledged that the "biggest challenge is to make sure that the Wii U sells well even in the next year after the holiday season."

"And we are working on that too," he added. Part of the company's plans to ensure long term success for the Wii U involves not releasing too many titles at the launch, a problem Nintendo has suffered from in the past.

"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," he explained. "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.”

Heading into the Wii U's November 18th launch, Nintendo currently has 23 games planned for release alongside the console. Some of these games include high profile titles like FIFA 13, Assassin's Creed 3, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. But in addition to these 23 titles, Nintendo boasts an incredibly impressive lineup of "launch window" titles consisting of 29 other games. Nintendo has defined this "launch" window as any time after the Wii U's launch on November 18, but before March 31, 2013.

Nintendo expects to sell 5.5 million Wii U consoles by the end of the fiscal year on March 31, 2013, a goal which some industry analysts call "disappointing and unrealistic."

So with that I ask you: Do you plan on purchasing a Wii U console?

[VG247]