The information involves us by way of Mat Piscatella, online game trade analyst at Circana (previously NPD), an organization that commonly publishes online game retail knowledge.
That this information is coming from him means this wasn’t any person selecting up a Wii U at a reseller or from eBay. Someplace, by some means, there was a retail retailer that had a brand-new Wii U that it scanned via a register and subsequently reported the sale.
How does this occur? As a former retail slave… err… worker, I can suppose of some methods.
Normally, when {hardware} like that is discontinued — because the Wii U was again in 2017 — a retailer sells via its inventory, and after a time period, the producer will ask for any remaining items again. Shops like Walmart and Finest Purchase will obtain directions on methods to ship again the inventory, field up the stuff, and ship it on again to Nintendo. Stock management for these firms is tight, so it’s unlikely (however not unattainable) that the Wii U was bought there.
I’d guess that this was a smaller retailer that carries video games however isn’t a game-focused retailer, like the place I used to work, FYE. Once I was there, we bought music, films, small electronics, and video video games, together with the newest launches and consoles. However as a result of FYE was primarily a music- and movies-focused retailer, we didn’t all the time get the newest online game stock information. In my time there, there have been a number of situations the place we had a inventory of historical video games that we didn’t know methods to do away with that, if bought, had been actually unplayable as a result of the sport’s servers had shut down. There was no mechanism to ship the video games again to company, and we had no thought methods to take away them from our stock system, so they only sat there.
That’s how I’m imagining this Wii U received bought. Some lonely retailer nonetheless had a brand new one after years and years as a result of it wasn’t vital or large enough for Nintendo to come back ask for it again, if Nintendo even knew that they had it within the first place. Some enterprising gamer sees the Wii U on the shelf (or some worker finds it buried within the again) and decides to purchase it. By some miracle, the SKU wasn’t discontinued within the retailer’s system, and Circana will get a report of the sale.
Whereas it’s tough to pin down precisely how this occurred, it’s far simpler to guess why somebody may purchase a Wii U anno Domini 2023: somebody received actually, actually uninterested in ready for Nintendo to port Wind Waker HD to the Swap.