Nintendo will be holding a special Wii U event on September 13 in New York City. It’s expected that the company will announce the launch date and price of the Wii U on that date. While the price is still unknown, a game peripheral manufacturer may have just given us the launch date.
PDP, a game accessory manufacturer, was giving a presentation today at GameStop’s managers’ conference. These presentations are used by companies to give GameStop managers a heads up on upcoming titles or accessories that will be coming out in the next quarter. The events are generally pretty boring and devoid of any details. It seems, however, that PDP’s representative slipped up today by revealing the Wii U’s launch date.
According to an anonymous source, a PDP representative said their line of Wii U accessories would launch a few days ahead of the console’s official launch on November 18. The source told Kotaku that the representative obviously realized their mistake and tried to change the topic. Unfortunately for PDP, the damage was done.
This is still all a rumor for now until Nintendo’s event next month. That being said, November 18 has always been the most likely launch date since we learned the Wii U was launching at the tail end of this year. The company always launches new hardware (and games for that matter) on Sundays. It’s also the last Sunday before Black Friday and the biggest shopping weekend of the year.
If this rumor turns out to be true, Nintendo is playing it safe with the launch of the Wii U. That’s not a bad thing by any means. The console will get a massive sales spike at launch thanks to the start of the holiday shopping season. Of course, all of this is contingent upon the Wii U being effectively priced. The console should just sign a death wish if it’s priced at anything over $300.
It’s just a little over three weeks until Nintendo’s event in New York City. We’ll find out then if this rumor turned out to be true.
UPDATE:
We received an update from PDP’s Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, William Otte, regarding today’s rumors. Here’s his statement in full:
Performance Designed Products (“PDP”) is aware of recent rumors posted alleging that PDP inadvertently “leaked” the official release date of the upcoming Nintendo Wii U gaming system during a trade presentation earlier today. To be clear, PDP has no knowledge whatsoever of the official Wii U release date, and thus it is not possible for PDP to have “leaked” this information.
During PDP’s presentation of our fall line of gaming accessories to customers at a trade event, we stated that our Wii U accessories would be available at launch. Much later in the presentation we showed our Epic Mickey 2: The Power of 2 accessories for the Wii and confirmed that the Wii accessories will be in stores by the game’s November 18 launch date. Connecting the Wii U launch and Epic Mickey 2 peripheral launch dates is inaccurate and false. PDP has no knowledge whether this is the official Wii U release date or not.
There ya go, folks. Epic Mickey 2 is launching on November 18. The Wii U might also launch on that date. I still say you can anticipate a launch on November 18, but don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
