It looks like the glory days of the Nintendo Wii are coming to an end, with the Japanese gaming giant posting its first financial loss in seven years.

Nintendo fell into the red for the latest fiscal first half year on high yen, with the games company blaming the combination of a rising yen and delayed release of its glasses-free 3-D handheld, the 3DS.

£15.5 million loss
The Kyoto-based Mario factory posted a 2.01 billion yen (£15.5 million) loss for the six months through to September 2010.

Nintendo announced last month that the 3DS would not be available this coming Christmas holiday season, instead releasing next February in Japan and later in March in the UK and US.
Because of the delay of the new 3DS, Nintendo cut its full-year earnings forecast to 90 billion yen ($0.6 billion) profit from 200 billion yen profit, representing a 61 per cent drop in profit from the previous year.

Yuta Sakurai, analyst with Nomura Securities Co. in Tokyo noted: "There were no surprises in today's results. The losses from currency are in a way just on paper."
Nintendo has sold a total of 135.6 million DSes and 75.9 million Wiis worldwide to date.


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Whoops...

I would anticipate a new Wii version soon. Maybe an HD version. They need something to invigorate sales. Though the strength of the Yen will be a problem.

The problem they've got with the Wii is the masses who have been buying it are exactly the kind of people who won't give a damn about getting a HD version. Essentially they're a one-shot deal. They buy a Wii, they play with it, that's it. At least until they get convinced there's something obviously better/different and just as popular. 'The Wii but in HD' isn't going to convince most of those people to upgrade. They're just not frequent upgraders.

if they want something to be as successful as the Wii, they're going to have to come up with something new that is just as different and unusual as the Wii is/was.

Jon

I would think that HD to the Wii might be enough to resurrect it in the US and Europe. Though I would imagine that that the problems are in the handheld segment.

Personally I think that it would just demonstrate how the Wii pales in comparison to its rivals. If you're the kind of person who cares about graphics, HD video etc, then you're just not going to buy a Wii over a PS3 or the eggbox.

Yes but the Wii does have more interesting games. It is certainly more novel than the XBox and PS3, which both now have their own motion capture systems to get the players involved with game. Meaning that the Wii does not gave a USP any more.

I'd argue that, as a gamer, that simply isn't the case. The Wii has a handful of very interesting games (Mario Galaxy, Metroid, No More Heroes for example) and an immense pile of utter casual shovelware I'm not in the least bit interested in. It doesn't have the depth of quality non-causual games the PS3 or 360 does, IMO. HD or not, the bare fact is the only company that makes 'hardcore' games for the Wii is effectively Nintendo, and they only make one or two 'proper' games a year. Whereas the PS3/360 get about a dozen a year from a whole host of companies who have pretty much given up on the Wii because when they've tried to make 'non-casual' games for it, they simply haven't sold.


Interesting word. Find me a non-casual Wii game that doesn't star a character that has appeared in games on at least two previous generations of NIntendo hardware. The gameplay can be innovative due to the up until recently unique controller, but the actual games and stories they tell are incredibly hackneyed.


I can see why someone who didn't have a Wii - because they bought a PS3 or 360 instead - might buy a Wii HD additionally, because Nintendo games aren't available anywhere else. But instead of a PS3 or 360? No. The vast majority of the people who will be happy just with Wii games already have a Wii and don't really see the point of upgrading to a Wii HD even if Nintendo made one. That's why Wii sales are dropping, that's why Nintendo profits are falling and that's Nintendo's real problem - they've based their market on a population that generally speaking don't upgrade their hardware nearly as often as the people who have been buying PS3's & 360's do. So how do they force them off the Wii when they want them to buy something else, when most of the obvious ways simply don't work on them?

The games I was thinking of as novel for the Wii were Wii Sports and Wii Fit, Though I suspect that something similar will appear on the other consoles before long. Though I will agree that the games were hackneyed. With the Wii controller if they had decent graphics they could have sold a Star Wars game of sorts and cleaned up. Though it is probably too late.

There's a Wii Motion Plus (or something. Coming soon. Or something) - basically it seems to be what the Wii controller hinted at being, but is almost certainly too late to the party to have any real effect...

The wii motion plus is just the wii controller with an add on sensor or two isn't it? Nothing startling.

Anmesia - in relation to Wii Sports & Wii Fit, it's not 'may' it's 'will'. Have a look at Sports Champions on the PS3 and the launch lineup for Kinetic on the 360, there are about four fitness games in a lineup of about 10 launch titles.

That's the point I was making - they can't do those things again and expect to sell them to the same people. Say you make 'Wii Fit HD', most of the people who already have wii fit are going to think 'OK, it's shinier, but it's just the same game'. They're not into games enough that the extra graphic fidelity is enough to make them shell out the readies for the new version. The Wii has (compared to the PS3 & 360) crap graphics. We know this. Therefore, I think, we can come to the conclusion that the people who bought the Wii over the 360 or PS3 don't actually care that much about graphics. So why, if the Wii HD is just a Wii with better graphics, is anyone expecting them to go out and spend money all over again on it? They patently don't care about the major differentiator between the two, so why would they bother?

Essentially Nintendo exploited a market that wasn't really considered before but one of the properties of this market is it has massive, I mean glacial, inertia. Shinier pixels aren't going to cut it. They're going to have to do something that's as radical and unusual as the Wii was when it launched, or the people who aren't gamers are just going to dismiss it as 'more of the same' and certainly aren't going to shell out serious money on it.

Jon

I fully accept what you say. I do not have a Wii and a Wii HD would have put it to the top of my shopping list. Though as you say the Wii has a different market.