Nintendo, earlier this year, said it was hoping games like Mario Kart 8 would spur people to buy the Wii U – and help it return to profitability.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be happening.
Stung by a rough holiday season and consumer apathy towards its latest console, Nintendo has slashed its financial forecast for the fiscal year ending March 2014 and cut its Wii U sales estimate by over two-thirds.
Nintendo said early Friday that it no longer expects to earn 55 billion yen this quarter. Instead, the company says, it will lose 25 billion yen. To put that into context, it’s a shift from a $527 million gain to a $240 million loss. Ouch.
How bad are things for the Wii U? Between the end of March and the end of September this year, Nintendo sold just 460,000 units of the system, the company confirmed in their latest earnings report.
Released last November, life-to-date sales of the Wii U stand at 3.91 million units, according to the company. That makes the Wii U one of the worst performing game systems of the past decade.
A bold claim? Yes, but take a look at first four fiscal quarters for other notable video game systems:
When Nintendo reported a $533 million annual loss in late April, it was the first time in the company’s 30-year history as a publicly traded company that it had fallen into the red.
Even though the loss was expected at that point, it was a mark of shame for Nintendo — and investors battered the stock. Now, as the company’s next generation console system prepares to launch later this year and the handheld 3DS device starts to get its legs under it, it’s hoping to get back to black. But not everyone’s convinced it will manage to do so.
Last year’s decision to slash the price of the 3DS helped the handheld gaming system from falling on its face, but it sure took a toll on Nintendo’s bottom line.
For the first time in its history as a publicly traded company, the game maker has reported an annual net loss, today posting figures that were $533 million in the red. That follows a $960 million profit for the previous fiscal year.
Nintendo’s financial year won’t end until the end of March, but the company is bracing investors for its first-ever financial loss – and it’s going to be a massive one.
By the time the year ends, the company expects to post an $837 million loss – a much worse number than the $258 million shortfall it had previously predicted.
The news that Nintendo will lose money this fiscal year for the first time in its history as a publicly traded company wasn’t entirely unexpected, but that didn’t make it any less shocking.
It was a rapid fall from the top of the gaming hill for the company, hastened by weak sales of the Wii and DS and the tepid reception to the 3DS. Investors weren’t happy, raising some questions about whether president Satoru Iwata’s job might be at risk.