Yesterday, GameStop held its quarterly financial conference call. Executive VP of business strategy Mike Hogan actually weighed in a bit on NX, and spoke about the potential sales the console could see in its first couple of years in comparison to Wii U and Wii.
Here’s what was mentioned:
Nintendo has confirmed that they will be introducing a new console in early 2017. So let’s take a look at the potential for just that one new console. Once again, we’re not projecting. We are simply looking at the potential for the new console in comparison to prior consoles.
Should the new NX perform only slightly better than the Wii U, it would generate 2.7 billion dollars in incremental sales over the first two years. Should it perform at even half of the level of the Wii, it would generate 7.5 billion units of incremental sales over that time frame. You can of course apply GameStop’s market share to estimate the impact on GameStop’s sales.
While it’s too early to offer definitive projections, we are monitoring the situation closely in terms of product availability and features, consumer awareness and purchase intent. We plan to provide updates this quarter.
Later in the call, as part of the Q&A, GameStop executives touched on speculation of NX using catridge media instead of disks. Regarding this, it was stated:
We saw these rumors, and of course we can’t comment on them. I don’t think we know anything about it anyway, but certainly for us physical media is a good thing.
The only difference would be on the refurbishment and pre-owned side, and actually cartdriges are much simpler to refurbish and repackage, so there’s a little bit of an advantage in that direction.
But it’s early, and we keep a cool head. Certainly I would say that there are rumors of that type, just confirms that this is an important console for next year, it will have physical media, we will play a role in it, our pre-owned business will also play a role, so we’re excited about that, and of course we love Nintendo IP, so… it’s all good news.
