Wii U: Target’s Top Selling Item Online

Black Friday is upon us, and with online shopping making the deals more accessible than ever before, stores like Target are experiencing some of their best sales performances ever.

“Demand outpaced 2014’s record Thanksgiving performance, making it Target’s biggest day for online sales yet, driven largely by electronics,” Target said in a press release.

Apple iPads and the Apple Watch were especially popular, but the unexpected top selling item on Target.com was Nintendo’s Wii U.

A Salute to Nintendo’s Failures

Nintendo has been lagging behind the competition in the sales department recently. With all the gloom and doom that has been generating, I thought it might be fun to look back on some of their other panic-inducing ventures, their darkest hours.

Or, as most of us fondly remember those times, Nintendo’s Golden Age.

Miitomo: A Study in Cross-Cultural Miscommunication

When Nintendo announced in late October that their first mobile app would 1) not be featuring a headlining IP, 2) be delayed, 3) be free, and 4) be a social networking app called Miitomo, stocks promptly plummeted 9%.

The initial reception was bad. Fortune called the decision ‘disappointing’ and ‘baffling,’ and investors scattered like cavemen caught in a thunderstorm.  Unfortunately, these sort of impetuous and petulant reactions are a symptom of a pervasive and largely unnoticed epidemic in the business world, and of which by extension we are all guilty: cultural insensitivity.

Wii U: The Real Reason It Struggled

First of all, if you’re a gamer, you already know this. You know because you lived it personally and you understand what happened.

The video game business analysts of the world, however, all have their own suppositions about why the Wii U struggled. And they’re all wrong.