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

theverge.com:

By Ash Parrish, a reporter who has covered the business, culture, and communities of video games for seven years. Previously, she worked at Kotaku.

We take a break from the Microsoft-Activision Blizzard news cycle to bring you this important announcement: 11 years after its arrival, six years after Nintendo ceased its production, and just a few months after it also shut down its online store, someone just bought a brand-new Wii U.

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