Nintendo Announces Wii Successor


Yesterday on April 25, 2011 Nintendo formally announced that it will be releasing a successor to its very successful Nintendo Wii. It is confirmed that it will be playable at E3 and that it wont be on the financial forecasts ending fiscal year March 2012. Nintendo basically confirms that the console wont be out until April 2012 at the earliest.

The juicy stuff are the rumors that have been circulating about this new console:
  • Planned release date of June 2012
  • Each controller has a 6" screen with a resolution of 800x500
  • Custom IBM triple core PC
  • GPU that is derived from the R700 series
Satoru Iwata, the head of Nintendo Ltd.
 The reason why Nintendo announced a Wii successor is because they formally released their consolidated financial statements, and it isn't looking pretty. Operating Income has dropped from 356.7 billion yen to 171.1 billion yen, a 52% decrease. Net Income has dropped from 228.6 billion yen to 77.6 billion yen, a 66.1% decrease. The decrease in Operating Income and Net Income show that sales of the Nintendo DS and the Nintendo Wii slowing down from its high sales. From my perspective, it seems to be a perfect storm that is leading to this situation. A lack of exciting games from 3rd party software developers combined with a drought in Nintendo's own releases does limit the excitement of the market. The other factor is the graphical limitations of the Wii, which allows the Microsoft Xbox 360 and the Sony PS3 to maneuver their respective consoles to appeal to gamers who favor more powerful hardware.

Nintendo has roughly 812.8 billion yen in cash, which is quite a bit of money. Microsoft and Sony could only dream of having that much money from console sales (for reference I have all the consoles but the Nintendo Wii).

The financial reports also had a good chunk of information about console sales:

Nintendo DS
Hardware Total Sales: 146,420,000 units
Software Total Sales: 839,480,000 units
Software Attach Ratio: 5.73

Nintendo Wii
Hardware Total Sales: 86,010,000 units
Software Total Sales: 716,09,000 units
Software Attach Ratio: 8.33

Nintendo 3DS
Hardware Total Sales: 3,610,000 units
Software Total Sales: 9,430,000 units
Software Attach Ratio: 2.61

Comments

Anonymous said…
As a fellow gamer, I was wondering your opinion on the PSN outage. In fact since you are nearly done with you MBA, what would you do differently than SCEA?

Take care
Tom!
(From Facebook. Not MySpace)
April 29, 2011 at 10:06 AM
KrisZ said…
Tom you actually hit on one of my future articles. What I view as a catastrophic mess, and I do have a pretty comprehensive strategy to deal with the issues. In due time, I have yet to finish my series on Convention Survival Guides.
April 29, 2011 at 1:47 PM
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