The company wants more gamers to try out the console

Mar 18, 2014 12:42 GMT  ·  By

The team at Nintendo in charge of the Wii U home console is replacing the Premium pack for the device on the Japanese market with an entirely new bundle that allows gamers to pick up a bigger package which also includes content from Wii U Sports Club.

The announcement was made on the official page of the Japanese division of the company and was spotted by NeoGAF, which also has an official image of the product that gamers will be able to buy starting on March 27 of this year.

The new bundle includes a 32 GB hard drive Wii U home console, a GamePad, passes for events like bowling, golf and tennis from the Wii U Sports Club, a Wiimote controller and the required wrist strap for it.

The new bundle is priced at 30,000 Japanese Yen, which is the equivalent of 295 dollars (223 Euro).

An official representative for the United Kingdom division of Nintendo has not offered any information on why the company has chosen to replace the old Premium package for the Wii U home console.

The official line of the company is, “this is a Japanese announcement and we don’t have anything similar to announce for the UK.”

Nintendo tends to use the home market in order to test ideas that might then be copied by its divisions in the United States and in Europe if they are successful.

It’s unclear whether three sporting events will convince gamers to pick up the Wii U, which has so far performed far worse than analysts and its own makers believed when the new platform was launched.

The original Wii owes much of its success to the popularity of the Wii Sports experience, which used motion tracking in an innovative and interesting way.

Nintendo is probably trying to create a similar wave of interest in the new home console by adding passes for three sports titles in the new bundle.

By the end of March of this year, the company believes that it will manage to sell just 2.8 million Wii U units all over the world, a much smaller number than the initial 9 million it projected in 2013.

The console is routinely outsold by the Xbox One from Microsoft and the PlayStation 4 from Sony in all territories.

Analysts believe that the launches of Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros. might revitalize its long-term prospects.