Iwata talks 3DS sales, was the best-selling game devices around the world in 2013

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata shared a few words about sales of the 3DS at the company’s investor briefing a short while ago. Continue on below for his remarks in full.

On the other hand, the situation for Nintendo 3DS is very different from Wii U. Even though we weren’t able to achieve explosive growth in the overseas markets during the year-end sales season, the fact remains that Nintendo 3DS was the top-selling game device around the world last year.

In the Japanese market, in particular, although Nintendo 3DS fell slightly short of the 5 million unit mark, it did reach sales of 4.9 million units in total for the calendar year. As I repeatedly stated, if one considers that apart from Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS, no other game system in its peak years has achieved annual sales of 4 million units after the year 2000, we can say that the domestic sales of Nintendo 3DS remained at an extraordinary high level in 2013 as well. In the U.S. market, an independent market research company called NPD publishes data which shows that Nintendo 3DS became the game device with the highest share in the last calendar year with lifetime hardware unit sales exceeding 11.50 million units.

The worldwide hardware sales of Nintendo 3DS have reached 42.74 million units, a sufficient size to expand this platform business.

To symbolize this, “Puzzle & Dragons,” which has been successful using an entirely different business model as a game on smart devices, has also appeared on Nintendo 3DS as the packaged software “Puzzle & Dragons Z” and sold over one million units in no less than one month since its debut in the Japanese market. “Angry Birds,” which also has been successful on smart devices, appeared on Nintendo 3DS as Activision’s packaged software “Angry Birds Trilogy” in the year-end season two years ago and made an impact on the game business when it sold over half a million units in a short time. Now that they have observed the success of “Puzzle & Dragons Z,” the number of companies who have approached Nintendo with an offer to provide Nintendo 3DS with the titles which they originally designed for and grew on smart devices has been increasing. As this example illustrates, the Nintendo 3DS platform has already reached a scale with enough business potential for not only the titles invented for game devices but also the ones originally made for other platforms.

With the overall software lineup, we aim to make this year and the next one a profit-generating phase for Nintendo 3DS.