I’m curious to know who bought the new Wii U in September

The news comes to us via Matt Piscatella, a video game industry analyst at Circana (formerly NPD), a company that regularly publishes video game retail data.

That this news came from him means he wasn’t someone buying a Wii U from a reseller or eBay. Somewhere, somehow, there was a retail store that had a brand new Wii U that scanned it through a register and then reported the sale.

How does this happen? As a former slave…err…employee, I can think of several ways.

Typically, when devices like this are discontinued — as happened with the Wii U in 2017 — the retailer sells through its inventory, and after a period of time, the manufacturer will ask to take back any remaining units. Stores like Walmart and Best Buy will receive instructions on how to return inventory, box it up, and send it back to Nintendo. These companies’ inventory control is strict, so it’s unlikely (but not impossible) that the Wii U will be sold there.

I think this was a smaller retailer that offered games but not a game focused retailer, like where I used to work, FYE. When I was there, we sold music, movies, small electronics, and video games, including the latest releases and consoles. But because FYE was primarily a music and movie-focused retailer, we didn’t always get the latest video game stock news. In my time there, there were several instances where we had a stock of old games that we didn’t know how to get rid of, and if they were purchased, they were literally unplayable because the game servers had been shut down. There was no mechanism for returning games to the company, and we had no idea how to remove them from our inventory system, so they just stayed there.

This is how I imagine the Wii U would have been sold. Some lone retailers still have a new one years and years later because it wasn’t important or big enough for Nintendo to ask for it back, if Nintendo knew they had it in the first place. Some enterprising gamers see a Wii U on a shelf (or an employee finds it buried in the back) and decide to buy it. By some miracle, the SKU isn’t stuck in the retailer’s system, and Circana gets a report on the sale.

Although it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how this happened, it’s much easier to guess why someone would buy a Wii U anno Domini 2023: someone really, truly Tired of waiting for Nintendo to arrive Wind Waker HD To switch.