Nintendo turns a profit, reveals plans for real-life theme park

Solid software sales overshadowed by a weak Wii U, but hey, Nintendo theme parks!

Mark Walton – May 7, 2015 9:15 am | 57

For the first time since 2011, Nintendo has turned a profit. For its fiscal year ending March 31, the company made a small operating profit of ¥24.8 billion ($207 million, £136 million), but a larger net profit of ¥41.8 billion ($350 million, £230 million) off ¥549.8 billion ($4.6 billion, £3 billion) in revenue. Interestingly, the profit hasn’t come from an uptick in sales, which were actually down 3.8 percent overall year on year. Instead, Nintendo is largely thanking a weakened yen for its much improved performance.

That said, there were some bright spots in the company’s sales performance. 3DS software in particular did well, with Pokémon Omega Ruby/Sapphire and Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS selling 9.94 million units and 6.75 million units, while the likes of Tomodachi Life, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D, and the practically ancient Mario Kart 7 all selling more than two million units each. Lifetime 3DS software sales have now reached an impressive 62.74 million units. 3DS hardware didn’t fare so well, even with the release of the shiny New 3DS and New 3DS XL. The 3DS family of devices (including the new models and 2DS) sold 8.73 million units, down from 12.24 million, with the company predicting sales of 7.6 million units for its next fiscal year.

A decline in sales isn’t ideal, but selling 8.73 million units is impressive for hardware that’s now four years old, and those sales still make the 3DS far more popular than its nearest rival, the PlayStation Vita. Lifetime sales for the 3DS have now hit 52 million units, which is impressive, but it’s still some ways off from the original Nintendo DS, which is the second-biggest selling console of all time (behind the PlayStation 2), with around 154 million units sold.

Software sales for the 3DS were a bright spot in Nintendo’s financials. Credit: Flickr

While it’s unlikely that Nintendo will ever be able to enjoy that sort of success with a dedicated portable again, the company again pointed to its upcoming mobile games partnership with DeNA. “A new source of revenue is expected from a gaming application for smart devices which will be released this year,” the company wrote in its financial statement. “As control methods and game play environments differ between dedicated video game platforms and smart devices, even if the same IP is used for both platforms, the games will not be the same; they will be optimized for each platform.”

OK, now for the bad news. The Wii U, which hasn’t exactly been a roaring success up to this point, hasn’t had the best year. While sales were slightly up from 2.72 million units to 3.38 million units, that’s still way behind the likes of Sony’s PlayStation 4, which sold 14.8 million units during roughly the same period. It’s especially disappointing considering some of the excellent games released over the past year, including the likes of Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, which sold 5.11 million units and 3.65 million units respectively. If two of Nintendo’s biggest franchises can’t shift hardware units, that’s not a good sign for the future, even if titles like Splatoon and Zelda are on the way. Lifetime sales of the Wii U have now hit 9.54 million units, with Nintendo predicting a flat 3.4 million in sales for the next fiscal year.

While Nintendo is continuing to develop its core business of games hardware and software with the currently in-development NX platform, it’s the other parts of the business that have been more successful of late. The company’s toys-to-life Amiibo figurines have been selling like hotcakes at retailers, with many sold out characters and limited-edition models fetching hundreds of dollars on eBay. Earlier this year, the company reported selling over a staggering 3.5 million of them, even though they currently only work with a handful of games.

Continuing with this expansion out from its core video games market, Nintendo today dropped some exciting news alongside its financial report, announcing a partnership with Universal Parks & Resorts to create Nintendo-themed attractions at Universal’s parks. Universal currently has theme parks in Los Angeles and Orlando in the US, Osaka in Japan, and in Singapore, with new parks on the way in Moscow and Beijing. While there isn’t much detail on the partnership at the moment—more information is promised in the future—color me extremely excited and hopeful for Mario- and Yoshi-based rollercoasters, Mushroom-based foodstuffs, and hundreds of wild Pikachu freely roaming the park to play with at will.