HiGame

Yesterday, a report from the Nikkei claimed that Nintendo might sunset the Wii U as early as this year, to make room on store shelves for its upcoming console, the Nintendo NX. While not implausible, given the Wii U’s anemic sales to-date, it was a surprising move given that the NX is still months away from its E3 unveil and still-unknown launch date.

Nintendo has since released a statement to IT Daily that the Nikkei announcement is not a formal announcement from the company and claims it plans to continue Wii U production into the next fiscal year and beyond. But is this true?
Historically, Nintendo tends to end-of-life its previous consoles far more quickly than either Sony or Microsoft. Both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are still in production, even though both the PS4 and Xbox One are now roughly 28 months old. Sony didn’t stop making the PS2 worldwide until January 2013, over 12 years after launch, and the original PlayStation was in production for roughly a decade.



Image by VGChartz. Wii U sales have never matched the Wii.

Nintendo launched the GameCube in February 2001 in Japan and discontinued the N64 a little over a year later, in April 2002. The US dates were similarly spaced, with a November 18, 2001 launch date for the GC and an N64 discontinuation on November 30, 2003. The Wii debuted in November 2006, the GameCube was discontinued in February, 2007. The Wii lasted a little longer against the Wii U, but was still discontinued less than a year after its successor hit store shelves. The longest-lived “old” platform of the past 16 years would be the Nintendo DS, which was available in Japan for more than two years after the 3DS launched.

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