Iwata: Wii U sales are "steady"

Nintendo president Saturo Iwata has described sales of the Wii U as steady”.

The company, however, has still not revealed any concrete sales numbers, although neither has it retracted its initial target of 5.5m Wii U unit sales by the end of March.

So far we know that the console sold 400,000 Wii U consoles in its first week in the US and 40,000 in the same period in the UK. It also sold nearly 640,000 in Japan between December 8th-30th.

So the 1m barrier has been broken. But UK sales have slowed dramatically, and if the same has happened overseas then the console it might struggle to reach its targets.

"At the end of the Christmas season, it wasn’t as though stores in the US had no Wii U left in stock, as it was when Wii was first sold in that popular boom,” he told Reuters. But sales are not bad, and I feel it’s selling steadily.”

The exec did acknowledge, however, that producing two different Wii U models (the Basic and the Premium) was a challenge”, with the cheaper SKU struggling to shift units.

"It was the first time Nintendo released two models of the game console at the same time and I believe there was a challenge with balancing this,” he added. Specifically, inventory levels for the premium, deluxe package was unbalanced as many people wanted that version and couldn’t find it.”

Nintendo’s share price has fallen 15 per cent since the launch of Wii U at the end of November.