Wii U first-party titles delayed to ensure longer sales tail

Nintendo pushed back a number of first-party Wii U games originally intended as launch titles in order to keep the system selling belong the initial excitement of the holiday season.

Speaking to investors in a Q&A following its financial release last week, Nintendo president and CEO Satoru Iwata explained the company's plans to keep the Wii U selling consistently after launch, something he feels the 3DS didn't quite manage.

"If you look at how pre-orders are doing at the moment, it is not an exaggeration to say that Wii U is sure to sell well in this holiday season, as many of you are probably thinking. But we realize the biggest challenge is to make sure that Wii U sells well even in the next year after the holiday season, and we are working on that too," he said.

"Nintendo tends to release too many titles at the launch of a hardware system and as a result suffers a drop in new games for quite some time after launch, and for the Wii U launch, we are being very careful not to let it happen. Fortunately, third-party publishers overseas are launching many titles for us this time, and we were able to push back the release of some of the titles that we had originally intended to release as launch titles until next year."

Iwata said one of the reasons the Wii sold so strongly and consistently post-launch is because it came bundled with Wii Sports, which proved to be something of a killer app, especially in the US. Nintendo Land may be the Wii U's answer to this.

"We are also looking to have many people experience Nintendo Land, which comes bundled with the Wii U Deluxe Set in the overseas markets, as this is a title that the actual players will appreciate more than the spectators," he said.

"While we have no way of telling whether Nintendo Land will do what Wii Sports did, we are hoping to promote word-of-mouth communication among consumers, and at the same time, we will continue to supply software to provide new content that consumers will talk about even after January. The combination of these two things is what we think will keep our momentum going after January next year."

The Wii U launches in November.