I am dying to know who purchased a new Wii U in September

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

That this news is coming from him means this wasn’t somebody picking up a Wii U at a reseller or from eBay. Somewhere, somehow, there was a retail store that had a brand-new Wii U that it scanned through a register and subsequently reported the sale.

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

Usually, when hardware like this is discontinued — as the Wii U was back in 2017 — a retailer sells through its stock, and after a period of time, the manufacturer will ask for any remaining units back. Stores like Walmart and Best Buy will receive instructions on how to send back the stock, box up the stuff, and send it on back to Nintendo. Inventory control for these companies is tight, so it’s unlikely (but not impossible) that the Wii U was sold there.

I’d guess that this was a smaller retailer that carries games but isn’t 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 launches and consoles. But because FYE was primarily a music- and movies-focused retailer, we didn’t always get the latest video game inventory news. In my time there, there were several instances where we had a stock of ancient games that we didn’t know how to get rid of that, if purchased, were literally unplayable because the game’s servers had shut down. There was no mechanism to send the games back to corporate, and we had no idea how to remove them from our inventory system, so they just sat there.

That’s how I’m imagining this Wii U got sold. Some lonely retailer still had a new one after years and years because it wasn’t important or big enough for Nintendo to come ask for it back, if Nintendo even knew they had it in the first place. Some enterprising gamer sees the Wii U on the shelf (or some employee finds it buried in the back) and decides to buy it. By some miracle, the SKU wasn’t discontinued in the retailer’s system, and Circana gets a report of the sale.

While it’s difficult to pin down exactly how this happened, it’s far easier to guess why someone might buy a Wii U anno Domini 2023: someone got really, really tired of waiting for Nintendo to port Wind Waker HD to the Switch.