Nintendo has officially announced the completion of its 11.4 billion yen share buyback. In total, the company acquired 9.5 million shares for 12,025 yen each, representing approximately 7.4 percent of its outstanding stock.
Nintendo’s purchase includes the 10 percent stake previously owned by the Hiroshi Yamauchi family. Yamauchi served as president of Nintendo for over 50 years.
The amount of shares sold by Yamauchi’s heirs is unclear. Moreover, it’s uncertain which member of the family sold stock in the buyback.
Along with this screenshot, Sakurai passed along the following message via Miiverse:
Pic of the day. When Lucario shoots out Aura from its hands to fly with ExtremeSpeed, you can control its flight direction. If Lucario’s Aura is fully charged, it can fly extremely far, so be careful not to accidentally launch out of the area.
After a month-long delay, Nintendo’s Pokémon Bank app is finally available on the European and Australian 3DS eShop. For the low price of absolutely nothing (plus a subscription fee), those in PAL regions can now transfer their beloved Rattatas from the fifth generation Pokémon titles to Pokémon X/Y.
Will the popularity of the application cause the eShop to crash yet again? Will Pokémon Bank also make it to the American eShop this week? Will my internet connection ever be stable enough to actually download the bloody thing? Stay tuned to Nintendo Everything for more details.
Sony UK boss Fergal Gara, in an interview with Trusted Reviews, made note of how Nintendo declining “could be detrimental to the market”. Gara believes that the company caters well to the younger demographic – something Sony doesn’t focus on in a major way.
He said:
[The decline of Nintendo] could be detrimental to the market, unless people like us raise our game and help tap into the younger consumer group that they serve rather well. That is the challenge to us. We need to bring maybe more family-friendly, more casual experiences into the market. I think there’s a big market segment there that we should take the challenge to engage and I see lots of potential to do that.
Gara went on to mention that the 3DS and 2DS family of systems were collectively the best-selling piece of hardware in the UK last year:
The DS family was the bestselling format last year, despite the stellar sales of the PS4 for the last four or five weeks, it was still the best selling console or console family.
Capcom is a company that has been trying for a while to dig itself out of financial trouble, and today prestigious producer from the company Yoshinori Ono has said that he believes companies that are only focused on understanding Japan simply can’t succeed worldwide anymore:
“The challenge for us now is determining the best way to adapt our approach for delivering services in each regional market. In Japan, for example, home video game consoles enjoy the same amount of popularity among gamers as smartphones and computers. On the other hand, there is little need to focus on game consoles in other Asian countries because they are only used by hardcore gamers. We do intend to continue marketing titles aimed at hardcore gamers, but in general our primary focus in the Asia is building up the market for online games.”
“Home video games are the most popular in the North America and Europe, so in that sense it’s like a larger version of the Japanese market. But recently the income gap has widened in certain areas, and there are differences in the attitudes people have towards games, so we need to adapt our services to fit the needs of each group. People involved in global business development who only know Japan have no real hope of accomplishing anything. To offer services adapted to each region, you need to take an active interest in regions outside Japan, and make an effort to understand their local customs and culture.”
– Capcom’s Yoshinori Ono
Although an application had been filed for the abandonment of one of Ubisoft’s main Watch Dogs trademarks in the US, it turns out the request was fraudulent.
Ubisoft says that it never filed the original inquiry. To follow up on the situation, the company has now filed a petition to the director of the USPTO claiming the initial request was submitted fraudulently. Furthermore, Ubisoft has asked for the Watch Dogs trademark in question to remain untouched.
A statement published by Ubisoft reads:
What happens when your company doesn’t have a name yet, but you’re trying to release a game on a proper video game platform? If the platform-holder is Nintendo, apparently they just make up a name for you! The following comes from Team Meat’s (Super Meat Boy dev) Edmund McMillen:
We didn’t name ourselves. We were just given the name by Nintendo in a random press release and we were just like, ‘Yeah, okay’. Somebody asked what the names were that we thought of before and we realised that we never talked about it! We never discussed anything, we just became Team Meat. I think it’s fine — it works. I mean, it’s kind of an honour, right?
Sort of a funny tale in retrospect, since most people know that as their official title and likely assumed that it was chosen by the developers themselves. Nintendo creates another gaming icon… sort of. You can read more from the guys over at Team Meat (who are really cool) in an interview with the print/pdf version of GamesTM magazine.
Update 2: Polygon has modified its story to indicate that it received confirmation from GameStop as opposed to Ubisoft.
Update: As it turns out, we do not have an official statement from Ubisoft. Polygon sources a Reuters article which does not specifically mention the Wii U version’s status.
Original: Despite Ubisoft’s relative silence on the matter, Watch Dogs is indeed still slated for Wii U.
The publisher first reconfirmed its plans to release on Wii U following talk of pre-orders being cancelled at some GameStop locations in Italy and the US. And after the title wasn’t included in Nintendo’s third quarter financial report, Ubisoft said for a second time that the game was set to launch in the first quarter of Ubisoft and Nintendo’s fiscal year. This period kicks off in April.
And as for Ubisoft’s plans to abandon one of Watch Dogs’ trademarks in the US? It doesn’t sound like it’ll be a big deal, especially with Ubisoft confirming that the game is still being polished.
Jed Wakefield, intellectual property litigation specialist at firm Fenwick and West, told Polygon of the trademark situation:
It’s weird to watch Amazon and Nintendo interact. The two companies have been at odds in the past with 3DS and Wii U sales, but occasionally something crops up that might hint at the two working together once again, only to have those hopes dashed by news of Amazon ceasing the selling of Wii Us or some other catastrophic bit of mishap. Today, however, Amazon seems to be on the positive side of the big N. Here’s what they had to say about the company’s future:
“Contrary to a lot of people’s opinion, Nintendo is here to stay and Nintendo will do very well this year. They’re not going to meet their expectations, absolutely, but they’ve still got strong franchises and strong hardware and if you look at the back end of last year when they had a fairly good release slate, it certainly drove their hardware. 3DS has done very well for us so that format is here to stay.
“I think Nintendo have this [negative view] imposed on them and it’s driven by a lot of the media, and the media drives perception,” he said. “Nintendo are getting a lot of bad press and PR and as soon as anything negative is out there it’s a media frenzy. It diminishes what they’ve actually done. If you look at 3DS as a format, it has done very well last year – had that sort of performance been with Microsoft or Sony, my personal opinion is that everybody would be thinking ‘wow, what a fantastic job’. Because it’s Nintendo and they’ve been embroiled in this negative PR frenzy, everyone thinks it’s a dying format. It’s absolutely not.”
– Amazon.co.uk’s category leader of videogames and software Ketu Patel
So at least in the UK, and at least within the game’s division of the company, Amazon appears to be feeling more or less positively about Nintendo. That’s sort of nice, right?
