It's not even financials season yet, but Nintendo is trying to lower expectations in advance. In a statement today, it's announced that it's reassessed unit sales for its flagship Wii U console, shaving hacking it down from 9 million for April 2013 - March 2014 to just 2.8 million -- less than a third of the original estimate. It's also less than the number of Wii Us that Nintendo sold in its launch year. That was 3.45 million, if you're counting.

The revised predictions are due to disappointing hardware sales during the holiday season and that's having an understandable knock-on effect on software sales too. Nintendo now predicts that instead of selling 3.8 million titles, the numbers will be around half of that: 1.9 million, which is at least an uptick from 2013. Alas, it's still an across-the-board bad news sort of announcement, however, with forecast console sales for the original Wii and the 3DS also bumped down in the process. (Nintendo now expects to sell 13.5 million 3D handhelds, down from 18 million.) This will all hit the company's financial results, with the games maker now expecting to announce a 35 billion yen ($336 million) loss, with part of this being put down to marked down Wii U consoles, something that Nintendo didn't predict would happen back in March 2013.