Nintendo Cuts Profit Forecast 70Pct Ahead of Wii U Release
The Wii U cannot arrive too soon. Nintendo has just slashed its profit expectations for the full year by 70 percent, and even this number may be a bit optimistic.
Nintendo said that it now expects a net profit of about $75.2 million for this fiscal year (which ends in march 2013), up from a $350.8 million loss in fiscal 2011. However, the new forecast is down from an original forecast of a profit of $250.5 million for the year.
The reduction is mainly due to a lowered shipment volume for the 3DS from 18.5 to 17.5 million units. Nintendo said it shipped more than 5 million 3DS devices in the second and third calendar quarter of this year. The Wii continues to decline much faster than originally planned as the company sold only 1.3 million consoles in Q2 and Q3, which was blamed on a lack of compelling game releases. For the full year, Nintendo now expects the Wii to sell only 5 million units, down from a forecast of 10.5 million half a year ago.
The savior might be the Wii U, which company believes will sell 5.5 million units until the end of March. The company indicated that the console is aggressively priced and will sell at a loss for Nintendo initially. The profits are therefore mainly in software sales: Nintendo believes it can sell every Wii U customer about four games - or 24 million copies in total. Given its history, this is a rather optimistic goal and will depend on a strong third-party lineup for the Wii U ecosystem. There is not much room for failure.

just sayin'
What the world really needs is the 473rd installment of yet another Mario game, because we all hate variety. When exactly did Nintendo come up with a new franchise character, rather than banging out the same tired ones from the 1980's?
The Wii U Gamepad Not Tablet does not just show you part of the game but you interact with it like an inventory screen or anything like that like in Zombie U your player on screen crouches down as you would in real life to saearch through the bag to get ammo or other stuff while the Game is still going in real time on the big screen it makes the whole survival horror aspect of the game much scarier
Also other games the GP is used as a 2nd view in to the world separate from the view on screen Also games like Call of duty black ops 2 uses the screen in Multiplayer with friend as aon screen to play split screen while someone uses the big screen just to game on and you use the Wii U GP of which is all Wireless
Also the Wii U is not justa small upgrade to the anything it is next generation system far better then anything the PS3 and 360 can handle . Multi-core CPU 2GB of ram in the system 1GB just for games a Radeon 7000 series GPU in the thing wel rumnored now to be a 6790 or somthing i dont know but still and the whole system is smaller then the Orginal Wii
The GP tho has tones of features on it but in order for it to work the console must be on as well everything is powered and rendered by the Console itself the GP has no internal CPU or GPU
You also have the Nintendo TVii features built in that works with your home DVR or Cable system
The old franchises are very good, you can't deny that... Pikmin is an excellent game, Mario is also very good and addictive...
But you are right, I remember the Rare times, they usually came out with new ideas and stuff...
Yes, the old franchises, it is just embarrassing now though. This cow has been milked so much that the milk has turned to dust. Give us new ideas please.
Yes the Wii just hemorrhaged money, right into the bank. That is EXACTLY what they are doing. They have tons of cash on hand, they are taking risks with a 3d handheld and a console that has a tablet gamepad. Risks do not always pay off.
I just don't think Nintendo is being realistic with their estimates. The Wii dried out a couple years ago, they should have had an HD Wii ready then to transition. There has been a few games this past year worth playing, but not enough to expect them to move hardware. The 3DS was not what people were looking for. Concerns about 3D eye strain make it a hesitant buy for parents and the price was just too high for the novelty. Add in the 3DS has not been as pirate friendly as DS, hardware based piracy does help hardware sales. If you had put out Pokemon 3D instead of a sequel to the last generation Nintendo, those sales of 3DS would have been far higher. Everything they're doing is just a couple years behind where they should be. If the Wii U had been out two years ago, Nintendo would have had some time to get systems in houses while Sony/MS still had no release plans. Now they've got less than a year before we hear more from the other camps.
let see just about every game developer is developing games for the Wii U and there is games like Zombie U that are exclusive to the Wii U many other games coming to the system within 6 months most of the games coming out next month on the other systems will be on the wii U launch day
Obviously you just woke out of a coma and heard about the Wii U just now and dont know or had no clue of the games for it or you just could not do a Google search for the games coming out for it
Oh lord, they're screwed. Nintendo has had the least impressive launch lineups in the industry (except maybe the PS3), and the biggest weakness of the Wii is the low number of third party games making good use of the quirky interface.
have you seen the Wii U launch lineup it has soem good high end 3rd party titels all of which are Superior to the same ones that will be on the current Gen consoles
Hell, Google or someone could buy them up, just to have the name.
This. Ignore the fanboy reds, Nintendo have finally killed themselves by sacrificing all their gamers for casuals, and people are finally getting tired of playing the same game year after year. Nintendo is a blight in the gaming world just as much as Call of Duty or any other uninspired rehashed series or publisher who balks at the idea of doing something original. Quicker they die, the sooner the message will be clear (if SWTOR wasn't enough of a signal to the gaming world...).