Nintendo Reduces Its Forecasts Due To Poor Hardware Sales

Nintendo’s perceived lack of success with the Wii U is starting to hit home a little more, as the Japanese gaming giant published damning results in a paper released today, reports Siliconera. Along with the paper is Nintendo president Satoru Iwata’s summary of the issues covered.

One of the most telling features of this document is Iwata’s confirmation that Nintendo’s expected net income of 55 billion yen is being reduced to an expected net loss of 25 billion yen.

Nintendo had originally planned sales figures for the Wii U, its latest console, of 9 million units between April 2013 and March 2014. This figure was incredibly optimistic and has been dramatically cut down to 2.8 million units. Software projections were also cut down to 19 million units from 38 million units. This is still despite notable spikes in sales of the Wii U when the big hitters came to bat last Christmas, such as Super Mario 3D World, and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD – both of which performed well critically.

Even the 3DS sales, which usually brings good news to Nintendo, are being re-forecast. The projected hardware sales for the fiscal year of April ’13 to March ’14 went from 18 million units down to 13.5 million units. Again, this is despite a major release in the form of The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, which also received critical praise.

This all comes despite last week’s stock market revelation that Nintendo had a higher value than Sony, one of its biggest rivals in the console market. Nintendo is holding a company meeting to discuss its strategies on January 30th.

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