reality (VR); Sony introduced the PlayStation VR in 2016. Though prior console generations have normally occurred in five to six-year cycles, the transition from seventh to eighth generation lasted approximately eight years. The transition is also unusual in that the prior generation's best-selling unit, the Wii, was the first to be replaced in the eighth generation. In 2011, Sony considered themselves only halfway through a ten-year lifecycle for their seventh-generation offerings. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata had stated that his company would be releasing the Wii U due to declining sales of seventh generation home consoles and that "the market is now waiting for a new proposal for home consoles". Sony considered making its next console a digital download only machine, but decided against it due to concerns about the inconsistency of internet speeds available globally, especially in developing countries. On September 13, 2012, Nintendo announced that the Wii U would launch in Japan on December 8, 2012. The PlayStation 4 and Wii U use AMD GPUs, and the PS4 also use AMD CPUs on an x86-64 architecture, similar to common personal computers (as opposed to the IBM PowerPC Architecture used in the previous generation). Nintendo and Sony were not aware that they were all using AMD hardware until their consoles were announced. This shift was considered to be beneficial for multi-platform development, due to the increased similarities between PC hardware and console hardware. In October 2013, online retailer Play.com announced that its Wii U sales saw a 75% sales increase. The company also predicted that the Wii U would be more popular than its competition, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, among children during the holiday season. Following the release of Wii Party U on October 31 in Japan, weekly Wii U sales spiked to 38,802 units sold. During the first two weeks of December, the Wii U was the top performing home console in Japan, with 123,665 units sold. In fiscal year (FY) 2013 (ending early 2013), Nintendo sold 23.7 million consoles. By February 26, 2014, Wii U sales had surpassed those of the Xbox 360 in Japan. However, by June 2015, the basic Wii U was discontinued in Japan, and replaced by a 32 GB "Premium" set that includes white hardware and a Wii Remote Plus. In mid-November 2016, Nintendo announced that Japanese production of the Wii U would be ending "in the near future". The PS4 was