Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata recently revealed the the Wii U will be sold for a loss. He has now said at a gathering in Kyoto that the Wii U will continue to sell at a loss until the next financial year (starting April 2014), which is when the production costs will go down and software sales will increase.
“In the next fiscal year, we will have a larger installed base,” said Iwata (via CVG). “We will have a richer array of software and manufacturing costs will also decrease.
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I believe that, as opposed to simply asking when we will be able to sell Wii U at a profit, the focus should be on constructing a healthy profit structure for the business as a whole.
“This is done by launching a sufficient amount of quality software at fast enough a pace for our home console, on which we can look to achieve a higher tie-ratio than on handheld systems, and selling as many units of software as possible.”
He continued: “I believe this is a goal we can achieve in the next fiscal year. While I cannot say exactly when the Wii U hardware will become profitable, I am confident that in the next fiscal year we can improve our Wii U business to a level where the platform business as a whole makes solid contributions to our profits.”
The Wii U will be launching later next month. Are you getting one?