Nintendo revenue down, Pokémon Go helps ease the pain

It’s financial reporting time and Nintendo’s back again with a bag of mixed results for Q2. These results cover the six months from April 1st 2016 until September 30th 2016.

Firstly the bad news; net sales were down quite a bit with a 33% drop reported. Nintendo says that’s due to the lack of big releases in the reported period. Nintendo also says the lack of game releases and foreign exchange losses caused an operating loss of 5.95 billion yen, this is after they made 8.98 billion yen operating profit in the same period last year.

Nintendo did still make some profit, mostly from selling their stake in American baseball team the Seattle Mariners and from their share of profit from The Pokémon Company. This isn’t just because of Pokémon Go, but also the effect the game had on Nintendo console games and merchandise. Pokémon Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire were up 124% and Pokemon X & Y a massive 312%.

Nintendo also released new sales figures for hardware and software. Only 530,000 Wii U systems were sold in the reported period, down 53% on 2015. Sales of Wii U games were down as well, seeing as there was pretty much nothing released this isn’t a shock. The Nintendo 3DS however has done alright with sales up 19%, Pokémon games on the system were also up again due to Pokémon Go and in anticipation of Pokémon Sun & Moon.

Nintendo says that Pokémon Sun & Moon should also help them sell more Nintendo 3DS consoles. Kirby: Planet Robobot also broke over a million sales.

For the Nintendo 3DS system, we are planning global release of the latest titles in the Pokémon series, Pokémon Sun/Moon, in November, as well as the Nintendo 3DS version of last year’s major hit for Wii U, Super Mario Maker for Nintendo 3DS, in December. We also have a range of strong third-party titles expected during this year.

Sales for amiibo were also down, in addition to a drop in digital download sales on the previous year.

As there were few new software titles offering amiibo functionality, amiibo sales were reduced to 3.8 million units for figure-type and 1.7 million units for card-type. In addition, there were relatively fewer offerings of downloadable content during this period, so download sales were down on the same period last year.

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There was no new Switch information about the console itself; Nintendo does think they will sell 2 million units of the console before March 2017. Super Mario Run is still on track for December with Animal Crossing and Fire Emblem news to follow after that – again nothing new.

Let’s see how Pokémon Sun & Moon fare, but that’s all she wrote for the Wii U we think.

Wii U Hardware

• Hardware Sales (this period) – 560,000 units
• Hardware Sales (LTD) – 13.36 million units

3DS Hardware

• Hardware Sales (this period) – 2.71 million units
• Hardware Sales (LTD) – 61.57 million units

Wii U Software

• Mario Kart 8 – 8 million (60% of install base)
• New Super Mario Bros. U – 5.45 million
• Super Mario 3D World — 5.19 million units
• Nintendo Land — 5.13 million units
• Super Smash Bros. for Wii U — 4.99 million units
• Splatoon — 4.57 million units

3DS Software 

• Pokémon X & Y – 15.64 million (+ 660,000)
• Mario Kart 7 — 13.94 million units
• Pokémon Omega Ruby & Alpha Sapphire – 13.18 million (+ 940,000)
• Super Mario 3D Land — 10.98 million
• New Super Mario Bros. 2 — 10.60 million
• Animal Crossing: New Leaf — 10.34 million units