Will 
Santa come before Christmas this year? Game makers certainly hope so.
As publishers and console makers in the video game industry gather in Los Angeles for E3, their annual trade show, sector players are looking for a lift ahead of the holidays.
Nintendo 
has seen its share of rough patches over the years, but the past 12 months have been a doozy.
After revolutionizing the video game industry with the Wii, the company’s follow-up console has consistently failed to connect with core gamers, casual gamers and, perhaps most worrying of all, game creators themselves.
When 
EA recently announced it would not be making a version of this year’s Madden franchise for the Wii U, it quickly declared its relationship with Nintendo was still a strong one.
That may turn out to be an overstatement, though.
The 
Wii U’s not living up to Nintendo’s sales expectations, and that’s causing the company to get a bit…creative…with its marketing plans.
Taking a cue from the viral marketing that works so well in the mobile industry, Nintendo is relying on its own older products to upsell its new system, attaching a blatant marketing message to the most recent Wii system update.
One 
of the tentpole events of E3 won’t be taking place this year.
Nintendo shocked the gaming world late Wednesday by announcing that it has decided not to hold its annual E3 press conference. Instead, the company said, it plans to focus on smaller events and will address the gaming world through a series of Nintendo Direct broadcasts, essentially cutting out the large, noisy middleman.
If 
there was any remaining doubt that the Wii U has been struggling, Nintendo erased that in its latest earnings report.
The company reported that in the past three months, it has sold just 390,000 units of its next generation console. Life to date sales for the Wii U are under 3.5 million. That’s more than 500,000 less than the company had predicted in January, a figure that had been revised downward from initial forecasts of 5.5 million.
It 
hasn’t been a smooth ride for Nintendo’s Wii U. It’s premature to call the system a flop, but it’s undoubtedly been a disappointment thus far.
Nintendo’s new console system had a decent start, selling 463,000 systems in December of last year, but that paled compared to the 890,000 Wiis that were sold during that console’s debut. Worse yet, the Wii U sales drop since then has been dizzying. In January and February combined, only 112,000 Wii Us were sold, according to The NPD Group. To put that in perspective, the Wii sold 683,000 in that time frame. Both the Xbox 360 and PS3 have thoroughly outsold the Wii U in 2013.
Nintendo 
has a problem on its hands.
The Wii U, in its second full month of availability, sold a paltry 57,000 units in the U.S. according to data from The NPD Group. That’s substantially fewer than its predecessor and well under half the number analysts were expecting for the month. And it props opens the door — and perhaps issues a warning — for Sony and Microsoft, which are both expected to roll out new consoles this year.
It’s 
much too early to dub Nintendo’s next-generation videogame system a failure, but it’s certainly off to a lousy start.
The Wii U sold just 46,000 hardware units in January at brick and mortar locations — a shockingly low number for a console that was just released in late November. To put it in perspective, the Wii sold 348,000 units during that system’s comparable period in 2007.
If 
you look at the raw numbers, it would appear that the video game industry halted its two-year sales decline in January — but numbers can be deceiving.
Video game software sales were up 1 percent in January as compared to a year ago and hardware sales climbed 4 percent, according to the NPD Group. Before you break out the bubbly, however, this is an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Chris Morris: Journalist 