Nintendo Refutes Report That Wii U Production Is Ending

While Nikkei, the Japanese business newspaper, may have a decent record when it comes to predicting and leaking the future plans of the country's tech giants, it seems its recent report about Nintendo ending production of the Wii U game console is a bit far from the mark. Nintendo has come forward and stated that is not true, and it has plans to continue producing the Wii U throughout the rest of the year.

It is a very rare occurrence for Nintendo to speak out in direct response to such reports, as the company usually issues the standard statement of not commenting on speculation and rumors. However, the house of Mario stated to Japanese website IT Media that Nikkei's report was not an official announcement, and that "From the next quarter and thereafter as well, production [of the Wii U] is scheduled to continue."

Nintendo fans still have reason to believe in the reasoning Nikkei provides in its report; mainly that the Wii U continues to be in a distant third in terms of users when compared to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and that it has failed to come close to matching the original Wii in terms of sales.

The Wii was so popular that production continued well after Nintendo released the Wii U, but at this point the latter has seen only 10% of the sales of the former's total. This is important to keep in mind with the fact that Nintendo is supposed to make its first formal announcements about the upcoming NX console this year.

Beyond the upcoming Star Fox Zero, there's really no other big first-party Nintendo titles on the horizon for the rest of 2016, possibly suggesting development has shifted to games for the NX. If this is true, Nintendo can continue producing Wii U systems as much or as little as it wants, but neither is going to help the console make a comeback from its poor performance.

SOURCE IT Media

VIA Kotaku