Looking for I am dying to know who purchased a new Wii U in September? We take a break from the Microsoft-Activision Blizzard news cycle to bring you this important announcement: 11 years after its arrival, six years after Nintendo ceased its production, and just a couple of months after it also shut down its online store, somebody just bought a brand-new Wii U.
The news comes to us via Mat Piscatella, video game industry analyst at Circana (previously NPD), a company that regularly publishes video game retail data.
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I am dying to know who purchased a new Wii U in September
That this news is coming from him means this wasn’t someone picking up a Wii U at an affiliate or from eBay. Some place, some way or another, there was a retail store that had a brand-new Wii U that it scanned through a register and subsequently detailed the sale.
How does this happen? As a previous retail slave… fail… representative, I can think of a couple of ways.
Usually, when hardware like this is discontinue — as the Wii U was back in 2017 — a retailer sells through its stock, and after a period of time, the manufacturer will ask for any remaining units back. Stores like Walmart and Best Buy will receive instructions on the most proficient method to send back the stock, put away the stuff, and send it on back to Nintendo. Inventory control for these companies is tight, so it’s unlikely (but not impossible) that the Wii U was sold there.
I’d guess that this was a smaller retailer that carries games but isn’t a game-focused retailer, like where I used to work, FYE. At the point when I was there, we sold music, movies, small electronics, and video games, including the latest launches and comforts. But because FYE was primarily a music-and movies-focused retailer, we didn’t always get the latest video game inventory news. In my time there, there were several instances where we had a stock of ancient games that we didn’t know how to dispose of that, if purchased, were literally unplayable because the game’s servers had shut down. There was no mechanism to send the games back to corporate, and we had no idea how to eliminate them from our inventory framework, so they just sat there. You can also read about latest gaming news from here.
Wii U get sold
That’s the way I’m imagining this Wii U get sold. Some desolate retailer still had a new one after years and years because it wasn’t important or big enough for Nintendo to come ask for it back, if Nintendo even knew they had it in the first place. A few enterprising gamer sees the Wii U on the rack (or some representative finds it buried in the back) and decides to buy it. By some miracle, the SKU wasn’t discontinue in the retailer’s framework, and Circana gets a report of the sale.
While hilarious, this isn’t a new peculiarity. Piscatella’s tweet mention that three new PS Vitas were sold in 2021, and back in 2018, some soul, who clearly has a penchant for self-mutilation, bought a retail duplicate of Sonic: The Hedgehog 2… for the Game Gear.
While it’s difficult to pin down exactly the way that this happened, it’s far easier to guess why somebody might buy a Wii U anno Domini 2023: somebody got really, really tired of waiting for Nintendo to port Wind Waker HD to the Switch.