14 DAY TRIAL // Nintendo is again riding high, when it comes to financial results, with profits going up more than 33% to reach some 992 million dollars.
Hardware wise the Nintendo Wii continues to be a success while the Nintendo DS is going through a tough period. The Wii is still the best sold console in the world, beating both the PlayStation 3 from Sony and the Xbox 360 from Microsoft by a wide margin. Overall sales during its lifetime are fast approaching 30 million and the first quarter of 2008 saw sales increase by 1.74 million units over the same period in 2007.
Meanwhile, the Nintendo DS is struggling to keep sales equal to those of last year, with an almost imperceptible slump of less that 100,000 units. The real bad news is that the PlayStation Portable, the direct handheld rival from Sony, has been topping the Japanese hardware charts for quite some time now.
Overall software sales jumped by more than 2 million over the same period last year. Nintendo managed to ship over 36 million games for the Nintendo DS and the Nintendo Wii in the first quarter of 2008, a period in which it had no blockbuster releases.
The best sold title for the game console was not, despite the hype that surrounds it, Wii Fit, with its Balance Board accessory, but rather the more fan oriented Mario Kart Wii, which managed to get more than 6.42 million copies to gamers worldwide. The Wii Fit sold, by comparison, just short of 23.5 million units. Wii Sports and Wii Play, which are sometimes bundled with the Nintendo made console, also continue to sell well.
The big hit in the videogame segment was, however, a new Pokemon game, called Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Darkness/Time. Nintendo says that the Western version of its title debuted strongly and it expects the Nintendo DS title to create a loyal following similar to the one of other Pokemon themed videogames.
The company is expecting to perform well in the coming months, even if no releases of major franchise games, like Mario or Zelda, are expected.