Nintendo Sees Loss on Lower than Expected Wii and 3DS Sales

Video game publisher and hardware developer Nintendo has announced its financial results for the first full fiscal quarter of 2011 and the company has admitted that the performance was pretty bad, with net sales dropping by 50 percent when compared to the same period of 2010, to a total value that is just over 94 billion Yen, which is a little over 1.2 billion dollars.

The overall loss seen during the three months has been of 25.5 billion Yen, translated as close to 330 million dollars.

The biggest problem for Nintendo has been that the 3DS has failed to have the predicted impact.

The device has sold just 710,000 units during the three months period as players proved to be nearly impervious to the draw of the glasses-free three-dimensional experience that it offers.

Nintendo has also admitted that it has also failed to launch hit video games for the 3DS and says it has sold just 4.53 million copies of platform titles.

The rest of the DS family managed to sell double what the 3DS managed while the Wii home console has reached 1.56 million.

Nintendo says that the price cut that it has announced is a way of attracting players while also showing that they care about its fans that have bought the 3DS near launch date by gifting them some free games.

Nintendo stated, “There have been times in the past when we, Nintendo, have marked down the trade prices for our video game machines a certain amount of time after launch to further accelerate adoption of the hardware but never in Nintendo’s history have we dropped a system’s trade price so significantly less than 6 months after launch.”

Nintendo has also announced that it has reduced the projected profits for the fiscal year that ends on March 30, 2012 by a staggering 81.8 percent.