GC and GBA sales in Europe continue Nintendo's upward trend

[Great Rumbler]

According to Nintendo Europe today, the company's successful console sales numbers are not privy to the US alone. Experiencing an incredible surge in hardware sales for both the Nintendo GameCube and Game Boy Advance during the holiday season, this news helped solidify Nintendo's position in the videogame industry. Claiming it to be the biggest Christmas yet for its home console, Nintendo stated an increase of 88% in sales of its GameCube hardware in Europe, compared to the same period the previous year. Nintendo is closing in on the 3 million marker for total GCN sales in Europe. As well, Nintendo's strong holiday line-up, which included games such as Mario Kart: Double Dash! and Mario Party 5, helped boost software sales by 45%.

As if Santa wasn't gracious enough, the GameBoy Advance also saw generous numbers across the board for the 2003 year in Europe. With GBA and GBA SP total sales topping at 33% higher than the previous year, Nintendo is giving the handheld competition a run for its money, and is strengthening its ground for when Sony's Playstation Portable hits the market. Handheld software sales saw the largest jump, eclipsing even the numbers Nintendo made with their GameCube. More than doubling the previous year's Christmas results, GBA software sales for this period shot up 104% with special recognition made due to Nintendo's perpetually popular Pokemon series of games.

There's probably nothing but smiles on the faces of the staff at Nintendo, particularly with the GCN. With stats that continually surprise Nintendo itself, and hardware numbers rising no less than 70%, Nintendo has become a force to be reckoned with in both the US and Europe. With incredible growth near the end of the 2003 season, 2004 is looking all that much brighter.

It's like people finally woke up and realized that there's another console out there besides PS2 and Xbox.

N-Philes

[OB1]

Yeah!

Go Phantom!

[Great Rumbler]

Silly, OB1, we're talking about the Indrema.

[OB1]

Oh....



*looks at ground, kicks dirt beneath feet*

[Great Rumbler]

:p

[OB1]

Blast.

[Great Rumbler]

So...yeah...

[A Black Falcon]

More good news... but from European gamers it still definitely seems like Nintendo is in third and is being treated as such by the stores...

[Great Rumbler]

It's possible that this boost put it in to second place, but I haven't seen any numbers for the Xbox yet.

[A Black Falcon]

I very much doubt that it's second in Europe.

[Great Rumbler]

Depends on how well the Xbox did.

[A Black Falcon]

Given that Nintendo isn't bragging about taking over? Better than Nintendo.

[Great Rumbler]

Yeah.

[A Black Falcon]

Anti-spin.

http://www.1up.com/article2/0,4364,1456659,00.asp

[A Black Falcon]

Why Nintendo's Japan-centric philosophy is a bad idea.

http://www.n-philes.com/php/epzvvzlvevkyvukvauf.php

[Great Rumbler]

North American sales are A LOT more.

[A Black Falcon]

Exactly. A LOT more.

Sure is smart for Nintendo to mostly ignore us and act like North America is identical to Japan in its gaming tastes, huh?

[Great Rumbler]

This brings up an interesting point though. If North American sales are so much more why aren't the Xbox's games selling huge amounts? Most of them are North American games.

[A Black Falcon]

Huh? Isn't X-Box selling about even with Cube in the US?

Third-party wise, I am absolutely sure that X-Box games sell noticably better than Cube. If this was not true, we would not be seeing as many X-Box and PS2 games as we are... and we've got a lot of them. So for third parties in the US the X-Box is a better option than the GC. Nintendo sells well, but as usual it's mostly Nintendo-published games that do... yes, Nintendo is doing decently with the strategy they have now and a complete change would be bad, but they need to recognize each market is different, and that they can't ignore it. I know that Nintendo will never be as good for third parties as the competition, because their first-party games are always the highlights on their systems, but they CAN do better. And would be if they were smarter... better advertising, aiming more for the adult market with more products (certainly not all, but more than they are), online gaming (a more important thing in the West than in Japan, I think, which is why they ignore it...), lower development fees... not using a purple console with a handle as your main symbol...

Nintendo can probably survive doing what they are now, but they'll never move very far up. Especially if time passes and they still don't change, because more and more people are thinking that Nintendo is being left behind and moving to more "adult" systems...

[A Black Falcon]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=13898

They'll never be able to do like Microsoft, though, and lose money on an entire generation of their hardware...

[alien space marine]

It is good hardware atleast!

What they need is make it were they dont lose money selling consoles,If they can break even with production costs and then make money with software contracts, Its what sony does and it has worked for them, But Nintendo vision is alot more profitable even if they dont sell as much.

[OB1]

Isn't that a tabloid mag?

[A Black Falcon]

Not a tabloid, but they do like to attack Microsoft and stuff...

Its not the National Enquirer. :)

What it says is that Microsoft admitted that they'll lose money on the X-Box overall and only will probably start making money on the thing sometime in the X-Box 2.

Microsoft CFO: Xbox will never be profitable

Xbox 2 may achieve the crossover

By INQUIRER staff: Friday 30 January 2004, 10:15
THE CHIEF FINANCIAL officer of Microsoft told analysts earlier this week that the current Xbox console will never be profitable.

In a very long presentation, John Connors told analysts in Boston: "There's no way to make money on the console in this first generation".

He said: "The real crossover in terms of profitability delta is when we get to the next generation of the Xbox console."

The key to making profits with the Xbox 2, he added, is how Microsoft does the hardware and chipset design, and how it sets up the supply chain.

When those elements are right, he said, "we have a good crossover point where that big negative number is no longer a negative number".

Here's the full text of Connors' speech. µ

It links said very long speech, and it is indeed very long. :)