Despite the apparent undiminishing popularity of the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo announced that it has made a loss during the first quarter of the current financial year, which ended in June. Overall sales fell with 25.6%, which lead to a loss of approximately ¥25.2 billion, or $289 million. During the same quarter in 2009, Nintendo made a profit of ¥42.3 billion, approximately $485 million.
Hardware sales for the Nintendo Wii increased with 36.6% as compared to the same quarter in 2009, part of which can be attributed to a strong first-party line-up. Nintendo indicated that it has already sold more than 4 million copies of Super Mario Galaxy 2, even though the game has only been available for just more than two months. However, despite this success, the overall Wii software sales dropped by approximately 9.3%.
With respect to the Nintendo DS, Nintendo indicated that hardware sales had fell by a staggering 44.7% as compared to a year earlier. DS software sales also fell, though not as steeply, by 22.9%. Over the last year, more and more developers and publishers have begun to phase out their support of the Nintendo DS, as piracy runs rampant on this platform. During the same three months last year, a total of 278 games were released for the Nintendo DS. This year, only 168 titles were released. Still, many of these third party developers and publishers have pledged their support to the upcoming successor to the DS: the Nintendo 3DS, which is supposed to put a halt to the widespread piracy on the platform.
Well that sucks, but with the release of the 3DS I am sure they will bounce back with record profits for handheld sales.