Exactly One Person Bought a Brand New Wii U Last Month for Some Reason

pcmag.com:

Years after Nintendo stopped producing it, and 15 months after its last sale, a single new Wii U unit was sold in the US in September, according to video game industry analyst Mat Piscatella.

Piscatella—who works at Circana, a company that tracks and publishes retail data from the video game industry—tweeted that a new Wii U hadn't been sold since May 2022, until last month. Piscatella downplayed the importance of the data ("Sales fun facts that do not matter"), but it's funny because Nintendo announced in November 2016 that it would cease production of the Wii U.

September’s Wii U sale was purchased from a retailer, meaning that we’re not talking about a Used (or even new) console on eBay or Craigslist. Someone walked into a store and walked out with a brand-new Wii U.

When asked how Circana could know about the sale with such precision, Piscatella said: "We acquire and process individual store level sales data for every sku [stock keeping unit] across most retailers, which combined account for about 97% of the hardware market. It does force us to use all our fingers and toes."

While we don’t know where the unit was sold, The Verge notes that it was likely sold by a smaller retailer rather than a big box store like Best Buy or Target. Traditionally, when a console is discontinued, a business will be given a period to sell through its inventory, and after some time passes will send what it has left back to the manufacturer. The Verge speculates that the device was sold by a retailer that was too small for Nintendo to want to ask for it back, or perhaps they might have not even realized the retailer had it in the first place.

The Wii U was introduced in 2013 as a competition for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. After years