Stephen Walters, chief economist at JP Morgan, said there was some "static" in the data with volatility in high density housing data in New South Wales helping to skew the result, but added it was still clear that a downtrend is underway in housing.

WSJ: Australia Housing to Drag on Growth

As we learned when the console was initially announced, the Wii U's "proprietary high-density optical discs" hold up to 25GB of data -- equivalent with that of Sony's single-layer Blu-ray format on the PlayStation 3, and much larger than the Xbox 360's dual-layer DVD format.

ENGADGET: Take a very, very close look at the round-edged Wii U proprietary discs