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Namco Bandai has shared its third quarter fiscal results. In the report, the publisher outlined new sales of titles released in recent months.

Below you’ll find figures for Tekken Tag Tournament 2, Tales of Xillia 2, and more.

Worldwide releases

Tekken Tag Tournament 2 (PS3/360/Wii U) – 1.35 million units
SoulCalibur V (PS3/360) – 870,000 units
Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm Generations (PS3/360) – 660,000 units

Japan-only releases

Tales of Xillia 2 (PS3) – 500,000 units
Run for Money (3DS) – 450,000 units
Taiko Drum Master 3DS (3DS) – 410,000 units

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If you missed the Paper Mario: Sticker commercial in its finished form, you can view it here.

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Yet another round of Kid Icarus: Uprising AR card packs are available in Japan. Two more rounds can be bought from Nintendo’s online store starting today – volumes 17 and 18. Packs cost 263 yen each.

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Scribblenauts Unlimited has been delayed in Europe, Nintendo has announced. The company said that the game requires “some changes” before launch. Nintendo apologizes “for any inconvenience this may cause and we hope to make further announcements on the European launch of these games very soon.”

Source: Nintendo PR


Update: Bumped to the front page with art and more screenshots.


Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed 3DS launch copies will be branded with a “Limited Edition” label. Metal Sonic and his Mod Pack vehicle, an additional Outrun Bay Track, challenges, time trials, and stickers for players’ in-game licence are included. The Limited Edition will be available while supplies last.

Consumers can purchase Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed in North America on February 12. Europe is getting the game on February 8, a few days earlier.

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Some retailers have Fire Emblem: Awakening in stock today, which is technically the game’s release date. Others, however, may not have stock available until later in the week.

A few retailers have indicated that Awakening is seeing shipping issues/delays/errors. Nintendo’s response to the situation is that sellers “receive their shipments on different days” due to “the variables of shipping”:

“Nintendo makes every effort to make sure its games and systems are available at retail stores nationwide on launch day. Sometimes, because of the variables of shipping, different retailers receive their shipments on different days. Fire Emblem Awakening can be purchased right now from the Nintendo eShop for Nintendo 3DS.”

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Nintendo has seen great success with digital releases thus far. In Japan, almost 800,00 copies of Animal Crossing: New Leaf were sold through the 3DS eShop.

Now, even though Nintendo is experiencing positive growth in the digital space, the company has no plans to ditch packaged games. Iwata did, however, acknowledge that there are issues at retail during the company’s latest financial results briefing.

Iwata noted that there are difficulties in forecasting sales. In the end, retailers are typically left with a surplus of stock “which ends up being sold at a huge discount or, in contrast, software shortages could cause lost sales opportunities for retailers.” This unfortunately leads to hesitation on the part of retailers since they are “less willing to accept the inventory risk.”

This shows the digital download sales transitions. For the current fiscal year, we have just finished the third quarter, but the digital sales have already reached 11.1 billion yen so far, and it is certain that in this fiscal year we will see our largest digital download sales. Another peak in digital sales you can see around the center of this graph is when Wii was widespread and Nintendo DSi had just been launched. In spite of the fact that the current installed base of Nintendo 3DS is still much smaller than how popular Wii was back then, we are already seeing the growth in digital download sales mainly for Nintendo 3DS, which, I believe, is an encouraging trend. I have no intention of simply replacing the packaged business with the digital download one, but it is also true that there are several issues with the current packaged software distribution business. For example, before launching a software title, no one can precisely forecast how many units of software will sell in the market. Everyone develops and launches a software title with the hope to make it a smash hit, but when it comes to the actual sales in the market, even the most seasoned marketers cannot forecast the figures accurately. As a result, retailers are often left with surplus stock, which ends up being sold at a huge discount or, in contrast, software shortages could cause lost sales opportunities for retailers. With these kinds of issues becoming increasingly challenging, retailers are less willing to accept the inventory risk. In this situation, even when a developer has created software with high potential to become a smash hit, it is likely to fall short of its real sales potential. Or, even though a quality software title can successfully attract the interest of potential fans, making and shipping just a little more than the actual demand can lead to a big discount in the marketplace and, thus, destroy the game’s brand. We have seen repeated cases of these. When I discussed with Shinji Hatano (Senior Managing Director, General Manager of Marketing Division) the company’s endeavors with the POSA card to expand our digital download sales outlets to retail shops, he stressed that it would provide distributors with a huge opportunity to solve the existing issues. A fairly large volume of “Animal Crossing: New Leaf” for Nintendo 3DS was sold in the form of a POSA card, which is activated only when it goes through POS registers at retailers and therefore the retailers do not have to shoulder the physical inventory risk. The growing sales of the POSA version of this game must have helped retailers see the business opportunity for video games with such a business structure. We therefore expect that our publishers may be interested in selling POSA cards for some titles they are publishing as download-only titles and that they will want to make more games available in POSA card format. Although convenience stores have limited shelf space to spare for a number of video game POSA cards, retailers with more shelf space might expand the areas designated to the video game POSA cards. They might even educate their customers who are not familiar with digital download software. We can expect to see a number of new possibilities. We expect our digital distribution to increase in importance and become an important revenue source.

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