Nintendo's not in a great spot. The gaming stalwart has been in a rough patch for several years now, with its latest console tanking against the competition.
Here's Nintendo's Wii U console stacked up against every other console the company's made in the past 30+ years:
While many consider the Wii U's failure to be an aberration for the Japanese game company, the picture gets a lot more stark when you put the company's entire console sales history on a chart stacked up against time.
In fact, the more accurate reading of Nintendo's history may be that the tremendously successful Nintendo Wii was the aberration in a decades-long decline in sales. Take a look at this:
That chart, tweeted by game industry analyst "ZHugeEX," shows that Nintendo's home game consoles have sold less and less well as the years have gone on. More starkly, the tremendously successful Wii — Nintendo's most successful home game console by far — looks to be an outlier. More directly put: the Nintendo Wii's success was not a "return to form" for Nintendo, which once dominated the video game market, but an exception to years of hardware sales on the decline.
Notably, the chart doesn't include Nintendo's massively successful portable consoles (Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, and Nintendo 3DS). This isn't a doom-and-gloom "Nintendo's falling apart" chart. The company's moving into mobile games, and the Wii U's successor — codenamed "Nintendo NX" — is getting announced in 2016.
What the chart does tell us is that Nintendo isn't the dominant force it once was in gaming hardware, and that those halcyon days of the mid-1980s may never return.
