- Pikachu, YOU NASTY!
We spoke on the second episode of the OWR Games Podcast about Nintendo’s recent financial news. On that podcast, I challenged the listeners to not take the doom-and-gloom news that most websites shove down our throats to heart when it comes to Nintendo. Once again I will show you that Nintendo knows what they are doing.
According to Gamasutra, Nintendo announced this week that they would be giving away a free copy of Pokemon to people who purchase a new 3DS, one Nintendo first party game, and register at it’s Club Nintendo loyalty site.
Any system from the 3DS family is eligible for the promotion, as are six first party games: Mario Kart 7, Super Mario 3D Land, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D, Lego City Undercover: The Chase Begins, and Yoshi’s New Island
This is a smart move for the company. They need to show that they still make great games and that those great games are going to bring people back into the fold. I think that American video game websites enjoy kicking these companies when they are down; America has a perverse sense of humor. But, just because our games media is like this that doesn’t mean that these guys have any insight into the inner workings at Nintendo. They are just fanboys who want to be correct and have a cadre of followers who “Like,” “Tweet,” and “+1” everything that they write.
Nintendo, once again I will reiterate, has a huge war-chest. A war-chest is the amount of money that a company keeps in reserve; like a savings account. Usually companies want to spend that money on R & D or other ventures that will help the company moving forward, but since Nintendo doesn’t produce much new hardware in comparison to Apple, another company with a huge war-chest, that money has just been sitting in an account.
Moves like this might dwindle away at that war-chest, but I doubt it. “Pokemon X & Y sold 11.61 million units globally during 2013,” Gamasutra tells us in their news post. So, I am sure that Nintendo has already recouped the costs of producing their newest Pokemon game. Which means that this is just Nintendo giving Pokemon away as an incentive to bolster 3DS sales and sales of it’s first party titles.
I would love to go out and buy a new 3DS. My 3DS is a Japanese 3DS, so I can only play Japanese games. Having a Japanese 3DS sucks because the 3DS store doesn’t have enough sales to entice me into purchasing games. Since most people in Japan purchase their games from game/entertainment stores Tsutaya or Geo, Nintendo doesn’t have much incentive to put the games on sale through their online store.
I would like to believe that the American arm of Nintendo realizes that American’s consume their games differently and, as such, need a different business model for their online Nintendo Store.
This news story is a good way for Nintendo to move past the doom-and-gloom news that has been following it around for the last couple of weeks and pad it’s sale for the first quarter of this new fiscal year.