Nintendo president Satoru Iwata reported today that the company has sold approximately 5.7 million of their wildly popular Amiibo figurines, up from the 700,000 units sold as reported in December 2014 - a rather staggering increase.
According to today’s Bloomberg business report, share value in the Japanese gaming giant has fallen 8.7 percent based on Nintendo’s struggle in hardware sales, despite its recent positive Q3 results this week. Nintendo has turned its profits back into the black, but that’s primarily due to the falling value of the yen - rather than successful sales of its Wii U console. The company sold fewer Wii U units in 2014 than it did in the same amount of time in 2013.
Today, Nintendo also released its most recent sales numbers, highlighting Super Smash Bros. on 3DS selling 6.19 million units in ove the holiday season, while only topping 3.39 million units on the Wii U.
It seems that the strategy of betting on high-profile Mario titles to bring in the sales of new consoles has run its course (or simply was never a solid financial plan to begin with).
“Nintendo has a problem of getting their concept of gaming gain traction among users beyond their core audience,” said Mitsushige Akino, an executive officer at Ichiyoshi Asset Management Co. in Tokyo.
This isn’t news to many of us, and we don’t have to be a market analyst to realize that Nintendo has struggled in the console wars for some time now, hanging on because of its core fan base but never quite reaching into the larger market when faced against console giants Sony and Microsoft. And while it may have gathered quite a war chest in funds thanks to the success of the Wii, that money isn’t going to last forever.
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