Nintendo continues to blame Wii U for its financial woes

The above image visualizes what we've known for a while: Nintendo is a company on the ropes. Earlier this year, the company braced investors for bad news: Wii U is doing much worse that it had anticipated. How much worse? It expected to sell 6 million fewer Wii U systems than originally forecast. With the financial year over, did they meet their target? Not quite. The company only sold 2.72 million consoles, falling short of their own revised figures. "Wii U hardware still has a negative impact on Nintendo's profits," the company said in its latest financial report. "Unit sales of software, which has high profit margins, did not grow sufficiently." Admitting that Wii U still faces "a challenging sales situation," Nintendo says that they will try to reinvigorate the platform by "providing software that takes advantage of the Wii U GamePad, utilizing its built-in functionality as an NFC reader/writer, and adding Nintendo DS Virtual Console titles to the Wii U software lineup, Nintendo will seek to enrich the value of the Wii U GamePad, the most important differentiator of Wii U, and as a result of the Wii U platform." Nintendo is still hoping Wii U will take off. Their forecast for the coming fiscal year (4/14-3/15) is 3.6 million Wii U systems, an increase of over 30%. Games like Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros will likely give the console the boost it needs--but ironically, neither do much to take advantage of the GamePad. Of course, if there's a silver lining, it's that Nintendo is still filthy-rich. Even the past five years have barely made a dent to their war chest. Nintendo can weather the Wii U--but investors won't necessarily be happy along the way.

Nintendo has a long way to go