The news comes to us via Mat Piscatella, video game industry analyst at Circana (formerly NPD), a company that regularly publishes video game retail sales data.
That this news comes from him means that this is not someone who bought a Wii U from a reseller or on eBay. Somewhere, somehow, there was a retail store that had a brand new Wii U that it scanned at a cash register and subsequently reported the sale.
How did this happen? As a former retail slave…err…employee, a few ways come to mind.
Typically, when hardware like this is discontinued, as the Wii U was in 2017, a retailer sells off their stock and, after a period of time, the manufacturer will request a return of the remaining units. Stores like Walmart and Best Buy will be given instructions on how to return stock, package it, and ship it to Nintendo. These companies’ inventory control is strict, so it’s unlikely (but not impossible) that the Wii U was sold there.
I’m assuming this is a smaller retailer that sells games, but isn’t focused on games like where I used to work, FYE. When I was there we sold music, movies, small electronics and video games, including the latest releases and consoles. But because FYE was primarily a music and movie-focused retailer, we didn’t always get the latest news on video game inventory. In my time there, there were several cases where we had a stock of old games that we didn’t know how to get rid of and which, if purchased, were literally unplayable because the game servers had been shut down. There was no mechanism to ship the games back to the company and we had no idea how to remove them from our inventory system, so they just sat there.
This is how I imagine this Wii U was sold. Some lone retailer still had a new one after years and years because it wasn’t important or big enough for Nintendo to come and order it back, if Nintendo even knew they had it. first of all. Some enterprising gamer sees the Wii U on the shelf (or some employee finds it buried in the back) and decides to buy it. By some miracle, the SKU was not discontinued in the retailer’s system and Circana receives a report of the sale.
While it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how this happened, it’s a lot easier to guess why someone might buy a Wii U anno Domini 2023: Someone really, In fact tired of waiting for Nintendo to behave Wind Waker HD to the switch.
