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While sales of the Wii U leave much to be desired, Nintendo’s Nintendo 3DS has sold over 40 million units worldwide. The 3DS is in a far better position than Wii U from both a hardware and sales perspective, and Nintendo say it will be their primary means of earning profits in their next fiscal year, which begins on April 1st, 2014.
Speaking with investors and analysts at a Q&A, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata shared that Nintendo intend to deliver a number of key Nintendo 3DS titles this year.
“Since Nintendo 3DS has an installed base of more than 40 million units globally as I mentioned earlier, we are now getting to the point where it is impossible not to turn a profit with our software business,” Iwata stated. “We have many key titles to be released in this calendar year and we will strive to drive profits from these titles. Seen in this light, I believe the key profit-driver for the next fiscal year will be Nintendo 3DS.”
Three of these “key titles” that Nintendo have already revealed presumably include Kirby Triple Deluxe, Yoshi’s New Island and the new Super Smash Bros. game; but in addition to first-party games, Iwata says Nintendo will continue to publish certain third-party 3DS titles from Japan in the west, both this year and the next.
“We sometimes distribute, or even publish depending on the circumstances, games that were made by Japanese software publishers in the overseas markets, and you can expect to see more examples of this this year and the next,” Iwata said to investors.
(The most recent example of this is Square Enix’s Bravely Default, an RPG for 3DS.)
Finally, Iwata also stated that more third-party publishers in the west are taking note of the fact that Nintendo 3DS sales are over 10 million in both the U.S. and Europe, but since western developers are more focused on delivering high-end games for home consoles, they’re still in the process of figuring out what kind of 3DS games to develop.
