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[Jokeropia]

I think you are clueless. At times business has been so bad that Nintendo tried their luck in Love Hotel business. And without Pokémon Nintendo would have been fucked in the late 90s.

I think it's funny that you call me clueless and then proceed to make two glaring factual errors.

I mean seriously? So many long existing companies have gone recently, nothing is granted. They post super-awesome profits this year and three years later they're gone.

They posted awesome profits last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, and the year before that, and the year before that going all the way back to their first public financial report in 1962. They haven't had a negative result in at least 48 years and with their massive warchest they could survive a decade of consecutive crappy years.

EDIT: Question, maybe anyone can answer me that: How big is Nintendo's "Warchest" when compared to the amount of money that Sony or MS have lost since the started their gaming divisions ?

I believe MS lost ~$4 billion on the original Xbox and is down ~$6.5 billion total. Sony has lost ~$4.5 billion since the start of this generation which is about as much as they gained during the PS1 & PS2 generations. Nintendo's cash and short term investment assets are ~$14 billion.

Wii is a one hit wonder. Mark my words.

Are you trying to say that Wii only has one hit game or that it's the only hit system Nintendo has made? Either way you're being awfully ignorant.

 

[Vinci]

When I posted earlier in this thread that people don't act like complete fuck-nuts and immediately count Nintendo or the Wii as doomed any longer... yeah, I was wrong.

EDIT: Out of curiosity, can someone name another company that has - from its inception - never posted a fiscal year loss? Not something really young; you know, a company that has at least had to go through several decades. Has Microsoft ever posted a fiscal year loss?

 

[ThatObviousUser]

Wii is a one hit wonder. Mark my words.

:lol

 

[Celine]

It's great to see Nintendo managed to sell 820k more copies Super Mario Galaxy during their past year.
It should probably fly by 9 million soon enough.

Source ?

 

[Opiate]

When I posted earlier in this thread that people don't act like complete fuck-nuts and immediately count Nintendo or the Wii as doomed any longer... yeah, I was wrong.

EDIT: Out of curiosity, can someone name another company that has - from its inception - never posted a fiscal year loss? Not something really young; you know, a company that has at least had to go through several decades. Has Microsoft ever posted a fiscal year loss?

It's not that uncommon overall: ALCOA hasn't posted a loss in decades, and neither have many of the best firms in the industrial sector. Microsoft never has, either -- although Apple has, many times.

However, it's 1) very rare in the technology sector, and 2) very rare in the entertainment industry, both of which Nintendo is a part of. Entertainment in general is a horribly unprofitable industry virtually across the board (movies, music, games, books, etc), while technology has a tendency to be feast or famine. They are the only entertainment oriented tech company to never post a loss that I know of.

 

[Haunted]

I did not know that Wii Sports Resort has sold 16 million copies.


Can someone please list the 10 million+ sellers of this generation again?

 

[Vinci]

It's not that uncommon overall: ALCOA hasn't posted a loss in decades, and neither have many of the best firms in the manufacturing sector. Microsoft never has, either -- although Apple has, many times.

However, it's 1) very rare in the technology sector, and 2) very rare in the entertainment industry, both of which Nintendo is a part of. Entertainment in general is a horribly unprofitable industry virtually across the board (movies, music, games, books, etc), while technology has a tendency to be feast or famine. They are the only entertainment oriented tech company to never post a loss that I know of.

Thanks for the clarification. All this talk really just got me curious.

 

[wRATH2x]

Woe is Nintendo.

Going 3rd party confirmed.

 

[Jokeropia]

Source ?

http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/library/events/100507/05.html

 

[Vinci]

Can someone please list the 10 million+ sellers of this generation again?

Wii Play (Wii – 27.38 million, Wii remote bundled with all copies)
Nintendogs (DS – 23.26 million, all five versions combined)
Wii Fit (Wii – 22.61 million)
Mario Kart Wii (Wii – 22.55 million)
New Super Mario Bros. (DS – 22.49 million)
Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! (DS – 18.72 million)
Mario Kart DS (DS – 17.90 million)
Pokémon Diamond and Pearl (DS – 17.39 million)
Wii Sports Resort (Wii – 16.14 million)
GTA IV (PS3/360 combined - 15 million +)
New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Wii – 14.70 million)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (PS3/360 combined - 14 million +)
Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day! (DS – 13.71 million)
Wii Fit Plus (Wii – 12.65 million)
Call of Duty IV (12.5 million +)
Animal Crossing WW (DS - 10.79 million)

That's as well as I can do.

 

[Haunted]

Wii Play (Wii – 27.38 million, Wii remote bundled with all copies)
Nintendogs (DS – 23.26 million, all five versions combined)
Wii Fit (Wii – 22.61 million)
Mario Kart Wii (Wii – 22.55 million)
New Super Mario Bros. (DS – 22.49 million)
Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! (DS – 18.72 million)
Mario Kart DS (DS – 17.90 million)
Pokémon Diamond and Pearl (DS – 17.39 million)
Wii Sports Resort (Wii – 16.14 million)
GTA IV (PS3/360 combined - 15 million +)
New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Wii – 14.70 million)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (PS3/360 combined - 14 million +)
Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day! (DS – 13.71 million)
Wii Fit Plus (Wii – 12.65 million)

That's as well as I can do.

Many thanks! (I really need to start bookmarking posts like this).

Halo 3 didn't make it?

 

[Nirolak]

That's as well as I can do.

Call of Duty 4 actually made it to 12.5 million as well.

FIFA10 was at 9.7 million as of December, but I'm not sure if it ever crossed the 10 million mark.

 

[Vinci]

Call of Duty 4 actually made it to 12.5 million as well.

FIFA10 was at 9.7 million as of December, but I'm not sure if it ever crossed the 10 million mark.

I added CoD4 to the list. Thanks, Nirolak.

And I've no idea if Halo 3 made it or not, Haunted.

 

[Celine]

Wii Play (Wii – 27.38 million, Wii remote bundled with all copies)
Nintendogs (DS – 23.26 million, all five versions combined)
Wii Fit (Wii – 22.61 million)
Mario Kart Wii (Wii – 22.55 million)
New Super Mario Bros. (DS – 22.49 million)
Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! (DS – 18.72 million)
Mario Kart DS (DS – 17.90 million)
Pokémon Diamond and Pearl (DS – 17.39 million)
Wii Sports Resort (Wii – 16.14 million)
GTA IV (PS3/360 combined - 15 million +)
New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Wii – 14.70 million)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (PS3/360 combined - 14 million +)
Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day! (DS – 13.71 million)
Wii Fit Plus (Wii – 12.65 million)

That's as well as I can do.

Animal Crossing WW ( DS - 10.79 million )

 

[Vinci]

I'm honestly just waiting for one of the Sales Agers to come in and go, "You missed X,Y,Z - and fuck it, here's a full list of every game ever made to go beyond 10 million."

 

[charlequin]

Jesus Christ, NSMBWii. Yet Zelda is pretty damn low

Zelda on DS is maybe one-sixth as good as NSMBW and sold about one-sixth as well. Sounds about right to me.

 

[JoshuaJSlone]

So the lack of shipment data from the 80s and early 90s makes the huge straight lines at those times comically imprecise, but hey.

So, something like 1 in 5 Wii households own a copy of NSMBWii, WSR at roughly one 5 as well. Mario Kart is currently at like one in 3.5. Can we even understand that? One in just over three Wii households own a copy of Mario Kart, a game that didn't even come bundled with the system. Thats...thats....nuts! And if you combine Wii Fit and Wii Fit +, than just under half of all Wii systems are running Wii Fit. I mean, I had known it was ridiculous, but this is the first time I'm actually running the numbers.

Has there ever been a generation with this ridiculous level of software homogeneity in the past? (excepting bundled games)

Those are big Nintendo hits for you. SSBM and MKDD also each went to about a third of GameCube systems, and Sunshine was about a fourth. Some of those come from optional bundles, though.

On N64: OOT, Goldeneye, MK64, and SM64 were in the fourth-to-third range as well.

 

[donny2112]

Uh ? I think he is asking how much each company has in the bank.

Not for Sony/Microsoft, he wasn't. He asked about Nintendo's "warchest" (the $9B + number) vs. how much Sony/Microsoft have lost since they started their gaming divisions.

Wii Fit (Wii – 22.61 million)
Wii Fit Plus (Wii – 12.65 million)

http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/library/events/100507/03.html

And, little less than 60% of them were sold as a set which included a Wii Balance Board.

22.61 + 12.65 * .59 = 30.07m Wii Balance Boards

Shipments:
Wii: 70.9m
360: 40.2m
PS3: 35.7m (assuming they hit their 13m FY target)
WiiBo: 30.1m

The Wii Balance Board has outsold the GameCube, and should outsell the N64 this FY.

 

[ZAK]

Barring some scandal, like Nintendo accidentally releasing New Super Mario Bros Wii 2 with porn as the opening movie, or a console that overloads peoples electricity when they plug it in, it's going to take two disastrous generations before Nintendo would contemplate going third party.

 

[Kilrogg]

When I posted earlier in this thread that people don't act like complete fuck-nuts and immediately count Nintendo or the Wii as doomed any longer... yeah, I was wrong.

EDIT: Out of curiosity, can someone name another company that has - from its inception - never posted a fiscal year loss? Not something really young; you know, a company that has at least had to go through several decades. Has Microsoft ever posted a fiscal year loss?

I'll be honest: I posted earlier that Nintendo has posted a fiscal year loss at some point, but I'm not entirely sure. From L'Histoire de Nintendo, there are at least 2 instances where Nintendo was at least in serious trouble (not Gamecube-level trouble, but say 3 successive Virtual Boy failures-level): the first time was in the 60s when Nintendo incurred debts for the first time since its inception; the second time was in 1973, soon after the first oil crisis: Nintendo's subsidiary, Nintendo Leisure Company, went nearly bankrupt because almost all orders of their Laser Clay game had been canceled, Nintendo's operating profits that fiscal year were divided by 2, and they suffered from 5 billion yens of debt.

It can at the very least be said that there were points in Nintendo's history where Yamauchi honestly wondered when Nintendo would go out of business. I can understand why he said that Nintendo would either rise to heaven or sink to hell with the DS.

This very last sentence is also proof that it'd be foolish to expect Nintendo to just go third-party/out of business if they suffered from one, or even two successive failures. They've been through longer streaks of failures... Although, Iwata himself has never that kind of hardships to handle. It could be argued that the market is harsher today than it was at that time, but then, Nintendo is way more powerful and experienced now.

 

[donny2112]

In case anyone was wondering why the 2009 Top 30 chart from Nintendo was "wrong," it's because Nintendo didn't follow the annoying practice of NPD of combining multiple SKUs into one title. This leads to Killzone 2 > Halo Wars, as one example.

 

[Mt Heart Attack]

Wii Play (Wii – 27.38 million, Wii remote bundled with all copies)
Nintendogs (DS – 23.26 million, all five versions combined)
Wii Fit (Wii – 22.61 million)
Mario Kart Wii (Wii – 22.55 million)
New Super Mario Bros. (DS – 22.49 million)
Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! (DS – 18.72 million)
Mario Kart DS (DS – 17.90 million)
Pokémon Diamond and Pearl (DS – 17.39 million)
Wii Sports Resort (Wii – 16.14 million)
GTA IV (PS3/360 combined - 15 million +)
New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Wii – 14.70 million)
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (PS3/360 combined - 14 million +)
Brain Age 2: More Training in Minutes a Day! (DS – 13.71 million)
Wii Fit Plus (Wii – 12.65 million)
Call of Duty IV (12.5 million +)
Animal Crossing WW (DS - 10.79 million)

That's as well as I can do.

World at War made it to 10 million as well.

 

[Vinci]

It can at the very least be said that there were points in Nintendo's history where Yamauchi honestly wondered when Nintendo would go out of business. I can understand why he said that Nintendo would either rise to heaven or sink to hell with the DS.

I think he meant that in terms of relevance, not directly in terms of money. [Though obviously one should inevitably lead to the other.] Sony had consistently been mitigating Nintendo's influence and relevance in the market that Nintendo called home. Nintendo was still doing quite well from a profit standpoint prior to the DS, IIRC.

 

[Kilrogg]

I think he meant that in terms of relevance, not directly in terms of money. [Though obviously one should inevitably lead to the other.] Sony had consistently been mitigating Nintendo's influence and relevance in the market that Nintendo called home. Nintendo was still doing quite well from a profit standpoint prior to the DS, IIRC.

Oh, definitely, but there's a bit more to it, I think. To me it sounded more like "the DS is our best idea for now. If it fails, I don't know what we can release in the near future"... Apart from a new Gameboy as a stopgap product. And honestly, you can't blame him, especially with the Wii. Nintendo couldn't compete with a traditional product, and Wii was the opposite of that. What option would Nintendo have left, should the Wii have bombed hard? Nintendo would have had to go on a hiatus until they found something different and new with potential. Yamauchi is a man who has tried to jump from market to market at various points in his company's history, sometimes failing several times in a row. I'm sure this possibility has stuck in his mind ever since.

 

[timetokill]

Oh, definitely, but there's a bit more to it, I think. To me it sounded more like "the DS is our best idea for now. If it fails, I don't know what we can release in the near future"...

It was a symbol of Nintendo's changing direction altogether. The Wii was already in motion and so the DS represented not only their success in the handheld arena but also the console arena. I can only imagine how tense the boardroom meetings were when DS was on its way. I don't think it was only about the near future, it was about the future as can be foreseen at all.

Fortunately for them, I think the DS really emboldened Nintendo with the Wii and gave them the confidence that it would work.

 

[Dalthien]

I think this is kind of an overblown concern, though. Nintendo of Japan remind me of an immigrant Depression-era grandmother a lot of the time, making bullheaded decisions out of a poverty mentality that usually just doesn't apply to the actual situation they're in. None of the titles I'd propose for first-party Player's Choice selections really compete with any of the evergreen titles since they'd all either be purely single-player (SMG, TP) or feature-light multiplayer "arcade" games (Excite Truck).

I agree that it is an overblown concern. If I was the one making the decision, I would have had a North American Player's Choice lineup on the shelves 18 months ago.

I was simply trying to put myself into Nintendo's mindset, and the only logical reasoning I can come up with is a fear on their part that a line-up of evergreen $30 top-quality software would eat into sales of their evergreen $50 titles. Such a fear is the only thing that really makes sense to me, especially when they saw how successful the Player's Choice brand was on the Gamecube for a wide variety of titles.

By the way, the grandmother reference was rather amusing (if all too true in some cases). :lol

 

[Turrican3]

English Q&A is now up:

http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/library/events/100507qa/index.html

Should be an interesting read as usual, judging from the tiny bits Google Translate got right from the original Japanese text. :lol

 

[A Twisty Fluken]

With regards to IP protection, I do not find a lot of meaning in calculating up the amount of damage due to piracy. While we may be able to calculate the damage by “number of downloads” multiplied by “their market value,” it does not necessarily mean that all the downloader had the purchase intention but quit due to illegal downloading. This calculation only gives us a virtual amount of damages, not the actual one in market. As I believe it’s not very meaningful to calculate them, we have not dug deeper and have no such plans to do so.

This is super rational and succinct, obviously you hear this from smarter GAF people all the time but it's good to hear it from someone in that position. It's funny, though, because didn't Nintendo itself recently release some of those non-meaningful calculations? Looks like that message needs to trickle down.

 

[DNF]

I believe MS lost ~$4 billion on the original Xbox and is down ~$6.5 billion total. Sony has lost ~$4.5 billion since the start of this generation which is about as much as they gained during the PS1 & PS2 generations. Nintendo's cash and short term investment assets are ~$14 billion.

Thanks for the answer, that's what i was trying to ask.

 

[thefro]

The investor Q&As always make me wish Iwata would do a roundtable with some gaming journalists at E3 every year. Would be interesting to hear Iwata's thoughts on core gamers in the West.

 

[AColdDay]

Q13 Mr. Iwata, how do you find the situation of video game industry this year, and where Nintendo stands among them? I have often been asked about IP protection issues by our foreign investors. If you have any data, how much damage have you received so far? Are you planning to apply any new countermeasure on the new 3DS? I have the impression that Wii has a very low tie ratio compared to the past consoles. Do you see it inevitable as Wii is mainly purchased by casual players? Or, with three blockbusters now in the market, what kind of further approaches do you think is needed towards the core gamers? Will a new price strategy be necessary in order to further expand the casual population. Do you have any price strategy in this term or next term, aside from what’s written in the budget? Is everything going according to keikaku(*)?
(*) keikaku means plan.

A13 (laughs)

.

 

[Starchasing]

This is super rational and succinct, obviously you hear this from smarter GAF people all the time but it's good to hear it from someone in that position. It's funny, though, because didn't Nintendo itself recently release some of those non-meaningful calculations? Looks like that message needs to trickle down.

i think they said their sales were down 50%

 

[Grampa Simpson]

]The Wii Balance Board has outsold the GameCube, and should outsell the N64 this FY.

Is it ahead of the PS3?

 

[Sadist]

Financial briefing English transscript

Some interesting stuff

 

[Nuclear Muffin]

While we may be able to calculate the damage by “number of downloads” multiplied by “their market value,” it does not necessarily mean that all the downloader had the purchase intention but quit due to illegal downloading

Glad to know that Iwata is thinking rationally about the piracy situation and not just assuming that all downloads are lost sales. Also I find it funny that one of Nintendo's investors seems to really put a lot of faith in the tie ratio, when really it is a crummy metric for determining the rate of software sales since it gets skewed downwards by high hardware sales.

Microsoft really have done a fantastic job in putting it at the forefront of most people's minds. "Hey it doesn't matter if we only sold 300 games last month, so long as we have a high tie ratio of games per person!" :lol