In what is no real surprise, Nintendo has confirmed that the Wii U sold out in its first week of availability in the US. The news from Nintendo comes as no shock, considering that all of the units that were to be available on release day were already spoken for by pre-order.
Still, Nintendo is pleased that it was able to move over 400,000 units during the console’s first week of sales. To put this in perspective, however, one might want to consider that Nintendo was able to move 600,000 of the original Wii in the first eight days of sales back in November of 2006, but this number is said to be for all of the Americas, not just the US.
Nintendo is apparently doing everything possible to restock retailers with additional units, but shelves remain empty at retailers as the console still is selling out as quickly as retailers can restock the shelves. A rumored large second wave of Wii U consoles is said to be incoming by the second week of December, but Nintendo will not confirm if this is the case.
So far, while Nintendo has talked about console sales, we have not yet heard anything about software sales; but we are expecting to start to hear some of these numbers soon. Third party developers and publishers that we spoke with remain tight lipped about how sales are so far for their titles on the Wii U.
Next up for Nintendo will be the release of the Wii U in Europe on November 30th. Again, it is no real surprise that Nintendo is expecting a sellout.