General Nintendo

Posted on 12 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, Videos | 0 comments

The video above was shown following the end of today’s Nintendo Direct. I imagine that most of you won’t have any ideas as to what’s being said, but Iwata’s laughs make it worth sharing the footage.

Posted on 12 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS, General Nintendo, Videos | 0 comments

Posted on 12 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News, Wii U | 0 comments

Last week, Nintendo provided a statement regarding Foxconn’s admission of child employment. The electronics maker, which is producing Wii U units, had some interns working at one of its plants who were less than 16 years-old.

Nintendo’s new statement reads:

“Nintendo was concerned to learn that underage individuals had been working at a Foxconn facility in China where components for some Nintendo products are produced. Nintendo investigated the incident and determined that this was a violation of the Nintendo Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Procurement Guidelines that all Nintendo production partners are required to follow, based on relevant laws, international standards and guidelines.

Foxconn has taken full responsibility for this incident and has moved quickly to ensure that all affected individuals no longer work at Foxconn. In fact, Foxconn’s own policies prohibit the employment of underage individuals and the company has pledged to Nintendo via direct communications to improve its process of enforcing this policy to avoid any similar issues in the future.

As one of many companies that work with Foxconn to enhance CSR along the whole supply chain, we take this issue very seriously. As part of our ongoing procurement process, Nintendo staff will continue to carry out on-site inspections of our production partners in order to understand the actual on-site conditions and to promote socially responsible procurement.

For more information about Nintendo’s Corporate Social Responsibility report, please visit http://www.nintendo.co.jp/csr/en/index.html.”

Source

Posted on 12 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 0 comments

Best Buy is holding a “Buy 2 Get 1 Free” sale which carries on through Saturday. Soon it’ll be Target’s turn.

The retailer is planning its own B2G1 sale starting on Saturday. The specifics haven’t been reported yet, but they should be similar to Best Buy’s guidelines. That means the offer should be valid on almost any system for games $60 or less.

If we receive further details, we’ll be sure to share them with you.

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Posted on 12 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS, General Nintendo, News, Wii U | 0 comments

Nintendo has provided an updated release schedule as part of its financial materials.

There aren’t a whole lot of interesting listings, but it looks like Brain Age: Concentration Training has been pushed back in North America to an unspecified time frame between January and March 2013. It’s been given a vague 2013 “date” in Europe.

Wii U games are also listed for the first time. Bayonetta 2, Smash Bros., and Monolith Soft’s next game are all “TBA”, though it’s nice seeing them on there in any case!

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Posted on 12 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS, General Nintendo, News, Wii U | 0 comments

Update: Now over, basically. You can see a more comprehensive version of the presentation through the slides posted here.

It’s that time once again! Nintendo is holding its usual investor’s briefing in Japan today, and analyst David Gibson is in attendance as usual.

We’ll round up Gibson’s tweets from the events below. I suppose you can consider this a live-blog of sorts.

– 9 of the top 20 titles in Japan are for the 3DS
– Europe/USA only has 3
– Nintendo doesn’t consider 3DS to be having a significantly positive performance given market is double in Japan
– 3DS has a 57% share of sales in Japan this year
– Only 18% share in Europe
– Only 20% share in the USA
– 3DS XL helped
– 3DS’ seven quarter sales have exceeded the DS
– On Wii U: Nintendo thinks there will be shipment bottleneck to meet demand
– GameStop sold pre-orders in 1.5 days
– 250,000 people are on the retailer’s wait list
– Wii price cut and bundles will drive sales
– Nintendo believes Wii buyer user base is different from Wii U, meaning the two won’t cannibalize each other
– 3DS connection rate increased from 10% to 72% in a year
– Japan and USA exceeded a rate of 80%
– The rate is lower in Europe/Australia, but Nintendo thinks that’s infrastructure-related
– Some retail software in Japan exceeded a rate of 15% from eShop downloads
– New Super Mario Bros. 2 is the highest digital game in the USA with Japan next
– Wii U digital downloads will be available “right after launch” (not clear if it this will literally be at launch)
– 3DS losses improved in the second quarter
– Decided on the Wii U price based on user acceptance of price, not on cogs
– “booked some WiiU costs in 2Q”
– Nintendo considering Nintendo TVii-like service for Japan; a different service is needed in Europe, and Nintendo has plans to announce that in detail in the near future
– “said nintendo’s focus is on game services, synergy with web and increased user satisfaction (rather than other services)”
– Admits smartphones have changed the environment
– Smartphone is “our friend”, not a threat
– Nintendo wants to provide entertainment that exceeds the 85 yen offered in the App Store and do something that can’t be done on smartphones
– Nintendo will collaborate with smartphone companies
– Miiverse fits into these plans with the larger the group of friends the larger the game opportunity
– Anticipating that the mix of third-party games for Wii U will be high initially which contrasts with the Wii
– The Wii saw low third-party support initially, but it gradually improved
– Nintendo has no intention of offering DLC extras for all games since they think it is unhealthy
– Will be done on a game-by-game basis

Source

Posted on 12 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News | 0 comments

When you’ve been in the video game business as long as Nintendo, you’re bound move a lot of product. But really, this figure is kind of insane.

In the entire history of the company, Nintendo has sold over four billion games – 4,015,400,000 specifically. That’s the total amount since the release of the Famicom back in 1983.

As far as hardware goes, over 637.75 million systems have been sold since the NES launched. Counting the Virtual Boy brings the total up to 638.5 million.

Source

Posted on 12 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS, General Nintendo, News | 0 comments

Nintendo’s latest financial results are in. They aren’t so hot, but there are a couple of positive notes.

For the full rundown of the report, read on below.

– Full-year profit predictions cut from 20 billion yen to 6 billion yen
– Poorer than expected overseas 3DS sales
– ¥23.2bn (£182m/$290m/€224m) loss from exchange rates unfavorable to the strong Yen
– For the six month period ending on September 30, 2012, Nintendo recorded global sales of ¥201bn (£1.58bn/$2.52bn/€1.94bn)
– This is down 6.8 percent on the same period for the year previous, recording a loss of ¥28bn (£220m/$350.7m/€270.2m)
– Nintendo is recovering from the ¥70.2bn loss it made for the first six months of the last financial year
– Net income per share stabilized from a loss of ¥549.53 for the first six months of last year to a loss of ¥218.93 for the period just ended
– Results were slightly below target for Nintendo, which had predicted losses of just ¥20bn rather than ¥28
– Predicted figures for the full year have been adjusted accordingly
– Profit of ¥20bn adjusted to ¥6bn
– For the last financial year, the company’s books registered a loss of ¥43.2bn
– In the first quarter of FY 2012, Nintendo recorded a record loss of ¥17.2 billion ($220.4m/£142m)

Nintendo statement:

“The Company continues to focus on selling Nintendo 3DS during the second half of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2013 and aims to expand its business by launching the Wii U system as the successor of Wii in the year-end sales season in the main regions of the world. The earnings forecast has been modified to reflect a yen appreciation stronger than expected at the beginning of the fiscal year, the actual sales result for the six-month period ended September 30, 2012 and a change in the outlook for the following six-month period from October 2012 through March 2013 by reviewing the mix of each hardware and software sales unit forecast. During the second half of this fiscal year, the assumed exchange rate of the yen to the U.S. dollar has remained at 80 yen per U.S. dollar, while that of the yen to the euro has been revised from 105 yen to 100 yen per euro.”

Source 2

Posted on 12 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in 3DS, General Nintendo, Videos | 0 comments

Posted on 12 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Nintendo, News, Wii U | 0 comments

Between the images we posted yesterday and the pictures in the gallery above, we should have all ten Wii U Burger King toys covered.

At least this Wii U deal is starting to make more sense! For awhile, it seems liked most of the toys wouldn’t be Wii U-focused. But as is shown in the gallery above, there are quite a few that feature the GamePad – in miniature form, that is.

If you head over to Burger King, any of the ten toys should be available now.