Nintendo FY3/2014 Financial Results Briefing, Part 2: Nintendo 3DS

“By leveraging upon the Nintendo 3DS’s large installed base, we are aiming to make this fiscal year a significant harvest year.”

☆ NintendObs Event – Nintendo FY3/2014 Presentation.

The installed base of Nintendo 3DS has already surpassed 43 million units, which is large enough to develop this platform business. By leveraging upon its large installed base, we are aiming to make this fiscal year a significant harvest year.

Nintendo 3DS already has a quality software lineup available now, many of these titles have been selling rather steadily even weeks or months after their respective release dates. Notable year-on-year sales growth has been observed especially in the Nintendo 3DS software sales overseas. The growth rate varies from country to country, but the software sales have grown by approximately 20 to 40 percent. By converting sales potential into actual sales, and by releasing strong titles periodically, we are aiming to sustain the momentum of the Nintendo 3DS business. Among the new titles, what will play a key role this fiscal year around the world is

The first installment for a handheld video game device from the series, “Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS” that we will release this summer, and

The announcement was made only yesterday, so we were unable to include them in the supplementary document for this financial briefing, but the latest installments from the Pokémon franchise, “Pokémon Omega Ruby” and “Pokémon Alpha Sapphire” will be released globally for Nintendo 3DS in November this year. They are full-remakes of the Game Boy Advance “Pokémon Ruby” and “Pokémon Sapphire” games, which sold more than 5.44 million units in Japan and more than 16.22 million units worldwide.

Furthermore, we will release “Tomodachi Life” for Nintendo 3DS for the first time in the overseas markets this June. In Japan, we have already released games in the “Tomodachi Collection” series: one for Nintendo DS and another for Nintendo 3DS, and we named the Nintendo 3DS version, “Tomodachi Life,” for the release abroad. This series is already known in Japan as a very unique, one-of-a-kind game, in which players create Mii characters of themselves and their family members, friends, people near them and people they know through books, TV, and so on, and enjoy the unique and unimaginable activities taking place in that world. In order to introduce overseas fans to this new franchise, our overseas subsidiaries produced and broadcast the Tomodachi Life Direct footage online. Fans have responded favorably to the footage by saying, “Once again, Nintendo will bring us another weird software title!” I personally have been hearing their reactions, and while some people still do not know what kind of game “Tomodachi Life” is, it appears that a number of them want to play it anyway. Nintendo is making efforts to make games just as popular overseas as they are in Japan, as we did so with “Animal Crossing: New Leaf” last year.

As for the third-party Nintendo 3DS titles, we think that “Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate” already announced for release in Japan and overseas will play a key role.

Also, even though only the Japanese release schedule has been announced, the “YOKAI WATCH2” (Japanese title) games, which are new titles of a franchise especially popular among children, will be released this summer. In addition, “Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth” and the latest installment of “Taiko no tatsujin Don to Katsu no jikuu daibouken” (Japanese title) from franchises which you can see on this slide will be released next month.

Japanese publishers especially have been aggressively developing and marketing Nintendo 3DS software. Out of approximately 34.22 million units of third-party software sold through in 2013 (excluding the ones from the three video game hardware manufacturers and Pokémon games), the platform on which those games sold the most was Nintendo 3DS, which captured 38 percent of the total sales units. In addition to the titles shown here, I hear there are many more titles under development, including unannounced ones. They have already taken advantage of the quickly expanding Nintendo 3DS installed base abroad for some of these titles. Nintendo has worked closely with these publishers and an increasing number of third-party Nintendo 3DS titles have shown results in the U.S. and Europe, including the Professor Layton series, Inazuma Eleven series and “BRAVELY DEFAULT.” By accelerating this trend, we would like to further grow the Nintendo 3DS business.

— Satoru Iwata, President of Nintendo
Source: Nintendo JP.