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Nintendo Profits Up Amid GameCube Worries

Posted by simoniker on from the good-news-and-bad-news dept.

Thanks to Gamesindustry.biz for their report on Nintendo's announcement of significant first-quarter profits, around $95 million (11.5bn Yen), "buoyed by stellar Game Boy Advance console sales, foreign exchange rate gains in Europe and the well timed re-emergence of the Pokemon brand." However, the article cautions that GameCube's current prospects are "...looking increasingly bleak, with a mere 800,000 units of the underperforming console selling through from April to June. Targets of six million have been set for the end of its financial year, but it's looking unlikely that it will reach this unless it's prepared to heavily discount the console in the run up to Christmas - something Nintendo has traditionally been reluctant to do." What can Nintendo do to get out of this hardware slump? Update: 08/05 20:43 GMT by S : According to this Reuters report, Nintendo sold just 80,000 GameCubes to retailers worldwide, not 800,000.

6 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Deep discounts. by RealityMogul · · Score: 2, Informative

    Deep discounts like the $100 one I bought from Wal-Mart last night that included the Mario game? How much cheaper can they make it? I don't know if this is their new price or my particular Wal-mart just had a sale going on or something. They just had a standard wal-mart price sticked on it that said $100 and no other info.

  2. Nintendo needs developers! by Fusion2k · · Score: 5, Informative

    Nintendo has a major problem with their business strategy: their relationship with their developers. Nintendo still has the mindset of a console superpower and therefore treat third party developers like crap. I have developed for Nintendo before and this could be seen as a rant, but if they want to shape up that should be their focus. The reason PS2 and XBox are doing well is they support and encourage their third party developers (Heck Micro$oft even paid for the development of a lot of projects during the early XBox days) Nintendo on the other hand makes the debug kits and SDK hardware impossible to afford for small companies and the cart and burn fees are much worse than the same fees for Xbox and PS2.

  3. GC DevKits... by Ian_Bailey · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...Nintendo, which actually gives away dev kits...

    According to Nintendo, a GameCube dev kit costs upwards of $10,000. Not to mention, "Financial stability is expected," which means they don't just loan them out to just-starting developers.

    Not that Sony isn't expensive either. And I can't imagine Xbox dev kits being too cheap anymore, either.

  4. Re:the answer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    And they look the same. Oh... and Link is the best new character. For as much as everyone wanted it, Spawn is just mediocre.

    They're ported titles (from the arcade no less). Very little system tweaking. Sorry.

  5. Re:Every house needs to buy 5 GCs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    I can give anecdotal evidence to back up the claim that Sony is selling more replacement units than either of the other two companies combined. I work part-time in a videogame store, and rarely does a shift go by where I don't sell some poor soul a new PS2 to replace theirs that either stopped reading blue discs, stopped reading silver discs, stopped reading DVDs (generally they pick one to stop reading), or crapped out entirely. So yes, I can support the claim that Sony's numbers are padded with replacement units, whereas I have never even heard of a Gamecube breaking. I've sold a few replacement X-Boxes, but the numbers seem small enough to be written off as an acceptible factory defect percentage.

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  6. Say what? by Daetrin · · Score: 4, Informative
    Update: 08/05 20:43 GMT by S: According to this Reuters report, Nintendo sold just 80,000 GameCubes to retailers worldwide, not 800,000.

    Can that number really be right? According to this chart at MagicBox the GameCube sold 4,500 unites the week of May 19th - May 25th. This Dengeki Chart says the GameCube sold 13,000 units in Japan for the week of July 21st through July 27th. So we know that sales have increased since the 4,500 a week amount, so let's say that 4,500 is the average for April - June, which is still probably low.

    4,500 units a week over 12 weeks gives 54,000 units. They sold 54,000 units in Japan and only 26,000 in the entire rest of the _world_?

    I think Reuters screwed up, and of course no one will read the correction they post later. Just one more bit of evidence for the percieved bias against the GameCube. What do you want to bet that if they'd made the same mistake for XBox someone would have stopped to question such an absurdly low number before the article was printed/put up?

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