This year isn't turning out to be a great one for Nintendo. After a weak launch for the 3DS that forced Nintendo to drop its price after only a few months on store shelves, Nintendo is now forecasting a loss for the year ending March 31, 2012 -- the first time this will have happened since the company started reporting its consolidated earnings reports 30 years ago.
Nintendo president Satoru Iwata feels responsible for much of this (as evidenced by the salary cut he and other executives took over the summer), although he's not about to sit around and mope. He and Nintendo have a plan.
"To begin with, I feel greatly accountable for missing our financial forecast for the half year ended September and revising downward our forecast for the full year," Iwata said in a briefing on the results that were revealed yesterday.
"Strong momentum is very important for game platform businesses and a strong software lineup to vitalize a platform is necessary to maintain this momentum. In the first half of this year, however, we could not make the continuing sales of the first-party software released last year as we had planned, nor, in the course of preparation of the next platform, could we release new key titles for the existing platform in a timely fashion due to completion delays until the latter half of this year."
After reviewing what's happened in the first six months of this fiscal year (from April through September), Iwata talked about trends and sales expectations before touching upon some specific plans the company has going forward. That includes continuing to try to capture the non-gaming crowd, a task it feels it can do regardless of competition from smartphones.
Nintendo plans to do this by "working on new genres of software that may attract people who are not particularly interested in video games." It will have "several" such titles to release in the next fiscal year.
"Some of you may be thinking that, with the expansion of smartphones today, proposing new genres, such as the company did with Brain Training and Wii Fit, might be difficult," Iwata said. "However, the company will aim to develop and launch products that can provide meaningful surprises to the public by taking advantage of the company's position of being able to make new proposals that integrate both hardware and software, and of its ability to develop products that can be accepted by a wide variety of consumers, irrespective of age, gender or past gaming experience."
In addition to those different types of games, Nintendo is hoping it can continue to hit on the sort of evergreen games it enjoyed with Wii and DS. A typical game sells the majority of its units at its launch and shortly thereafter. Each of the DS games shown above enjoyed 66 percent or more of its sales following its launch year; Mario Kart DS was the most exceptional in this regard with 81% of its life-to-date sales came after its launch year. New Super Mario Bros. did 66 percent of its sales after its launch year, a figure which equated to nearly 20 million additional units. What's especially impressive about this is when remembering Nintendo's hesitance to drop the prices of these games, unlike your average game which many times will drop in price in less than a year after release.
Iwata said that Nintendo's two big fall 3DS releases -- Super Mario 3D Land and Mario Kart 7 -- have the potential for this sort of tail, as does Nintendogs + Cats. Provided the hardware continues to sell, there's no reason to believe he's wrong.
Continued on page two
Source: http://www.1up.com/news/iwata-talks-new-genres-3ds-demos-eshop-smartphones-wii-u
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