I’m dying to know who bought a brand new Wii U in September

The information involves us through Mat Piscatella, online game trade analyst at Circana (previously NPD), an organization that often publishes online game retail knowledge.

That this information is coming from him means this wasn’t any person choosing up a Wii U at a reseller or from eBay. Someplace, someway, there was a retail retailer that had a brand-new Wii U that it scanned by way of a register and subsequently reported the sale.

How does this occur? As a former retail slave… err… worker, I can assume of some methods.

Normally, when {hardware} like that is discontinued — because the Wii U was again in 2017 — a retailer sells by way of its inventory, and after a time frame, the producer will ask for any remaining models again. Shops like Walmart and Finest Purchase will obtain directions on easy methods to ship again the inventory, field up the stuff, and ship it on again to Nintendo. Stock management for these corporations is tight, so it’s unlikely (however not unattainable) that the Wii U was offered there.

I’d guess that this was a smaller retailer that carries video games however isn’t a game-focused retailer, like the place I used to work, FYE. Once I was there, we offered music, films, small electronics, and video video games, together with the most recent launches and consoles. However as a result of FYE was primarily a music- and movies-focused retailer, we didn’t all the time get the most recent online game stock information. In my time there, there have been a number of situations the place we had a inventory of historical video games that we didn’t know easy methods to eliminate that, if bought, had been actually unplayable as a result of the sport’s servers had shut down. There was no mechanism to ship the video games again to company, and we had no thought easy methods to take away them from our stock system, so they simply sat there.

That’s how I’m imagining this Wii U bought offered. Some lonely retailer nonetheless had a brand new one after years and years as a result of it wasn’t necessary or large enough for Nintendo to return ask for it again, if Nintendo even knew that they had it within the first place. Some enterprising gamer sees the Wii U on the shelf (or some worker finds it buried within the again) and decides to purchase it. By some miracle, the SKU wasn’t discontinued within the retailer’s system, and Circana will get a report of the sale.

Whereas it’s tough to pin down precisely how this occurred, it’s far simpler to guess why somebody would possibly purchase a Wii U anno Domini 2023: somebody bought actually, actually bored with ready for Nintendo to port Wind Waker HD to the Swap.