Even the Nintendo prez can't believe the success of the DS. Also, 40% of Wiis are connected to the Internet and a lot of games are being developed by Nintendo. http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/newsArt.cfm?artid=13376 In addition to releasing its financial report this week, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata held a press conference for his company's investors. The presentation highlighted Nintendo's reasons for success over the past year, most of which was due to the Nintendo DS. Predictably, Iwata focused his attention on the handheld for the bulk of his speech.
Here are some of the highlights of the press event, which you can watch here.
- The 23.56 million DS systems Nintendo shipped out in the past year is the biggest single-year shipment total in Nintendo's history.
- Collectively, the Brain Age games have sold more than 12 million copies, with no sign of slowing down. Talking about the longevity of the series, Iwata proclaimed that Brain Age has "destroyed the industry standard that software can only be sold for a couple of weeks after launch."
- Nintendo's internal research has found that first-time DS owners that started with Brain Age have gone on to buy other Nintendo games, the top three being New Super Mario Bros, Big Brain Academy and Nintendogs.
- 13.6 million copies of Nintendogs have been sold worldwide.
- In Japan, 15 of Nintendo's DS games have sold over a million. Of those, three have sold over four million: New Super Mario Bros., Brain Training 2 and Animal Crossing DS.
- Four third party Japanese DS games have also sold over a million, although Iwata didn't mention which ones.
- Iwata remarked that the Nintendo DS is the fastest-selling game hardware in Japanese history.
- In talking about the trends in the Japanese market, Iwata pointed out how in years past, the console market has traditionally been larger than the handheld market. However, this past year that trend flipped, and the portable market was 1.6 times larger than the console market in 2006. Iwata said that this turn of events is "historically unbelievable."
- Moving to worldwide charts, Iwata showed the top 20 games of previous years from various countries. In 2005, Very few to no Nintendo games were on the charts. In 2006, more games on Nintendo systems started to show up. Using Q1 2007 and recent weekly figures to drive the point home, Nintendo games dominate the charts. After showing that 18 out of 20 games on the German top sellers list were for Nintendo hardware, Iwata remarked, "I have never seen anything like this."
- Approximately 40% of Wii consoles are connected to the Internet.
- Worldwide, 3.3 million Virtual Console games have been paid for and downloaded.
- In the past year, Nintendo sold about 150 million games across all its systems. Iwata stated that Nintendo's goal for this year is to double that number and sell 300 million games worldwide.
In related news, Bloomberg learned that Nintendo currently has 45 Wii games and 79 DS games under development. However, it wasn't made clear if all of these games are actually being developed by Nintendo, or if they include third party titles.
Topic: Iwata on Nintendo's Financial Report (Read 4178 times)
