Wii U Production Comes to an End This Week

This is it folks. The final Wii U console will be produced this week. I just want to start this off by saying that I'm a big fan of Nintendo and I love the work that they do, but man, the Wii U did not do well at all. I'm going to start pulling out some figures here so you can get an accurate representation of just how bad the console did.

• Nintendo 64 - 32 million units sold
• GameCube - 21 million units sold
• Wii - 101 million units sold
• Wii U - 13.4 million units sold

Aside from the Wii U, when I first saw this list and noticed that only 21 million GameCubes were sold I was shocked. I thought everybody had a GameCube when I was younger. That was all I played after my N64, but anyway, 13.4 million units. These are worldwide numbers too. Let's say the console was sold only in Texas. If 13.4 million people in Texas bought the Wii U, that would still only be half of the state. 50% of the people living in Texas would have a Wii U and nobody else in the world would have one.

So let's use these numbers to make a fun little estimate on how many Switch consoles will be sold. From the Nintendo 64 to the GameCube, Nintendo sold 11 million fewer consoles. From the GameCube to Wii, they sold 80 million more consoles. So you take the 11 million they lost and multiply it by about 7.3. Now let's apply this from the Wii to Wii U. Here, Nintendo sold 87.6 million fewer copies, so let's multiply that by 7.3.

According to the recent trend, the Nintendo Switch will sell roughly 639.5 million copies worldwide.

I bet my life Nintendo is really hoping that my nonsensical number-crunching is correct.