The Wii U will live on for at least a little while longer. That’s the official word from Nintendo, which denied a report to the contrary from earlier this week.
“There is no change to our continuing [Wii U] production,” a Nintendo spokesperson told Japan’s IT Media yesterday according to a Kotaku translation. The company representative admitted to not being familiar with the details of the earlier report but still felt confident stating that it “was not true.”
The report in question claimed that the final Nintendo Wii U console would be rolling off the production line this week as Nintendo turned its attention fully toward launching its Switch hybrid console in March 2017. Nintendo itself had not announced a Wii U production end date alongside its Switch, which the company described as a home console “first and foremost.” Instead, Nintendo referred back to its statement from April of this year that it planned to ship 800,000 units by the end of its fiscal year.
Multiple anonymous sources corroborated this week’s rumor that Wii U production was about to end. Rumors of the Wii U’s demise now appear to have been greatly somewhat exaggerated.
“Even though the Nintendo Switch is slated to go on sale, [Wii U] production is scheduled to continue,” the company spokesperson told IT Media.
It’s easy to see why Nintendo has shifted down its manufacturing of its current console and why rumors that it was ending it seemed believable. The Switch’s launch is just five months away, and while console holders don’t always immediately kill off a current console when announcing a new one, Nintendo might want to. Just 13.36 million Wii Us have been sold as of September 30, which is an abysmal number considering the console launched all the way back in 2012.
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