Nintendo Makes Mega Bucks

[Gareth]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6594443.stm

Massive demand for Nintendo's Wii games machine and soaring sales of its DS console have brought record profits for the Japanese firm.

Its net profits grew 77.2% to 174.3bn yen (£731m; $1.4bn) in the year to 31 March, while sales surged 90%.

[Halcyon]

Nintendo have been on the up for a good while now.
Unlike Sega that left the games console market and Sony that have had mixed reactions with the release of the PS3, Nintendo keeps dominating in every way.

You just have to look at the gaming charts to see how nearly all games are either DS games or games made by Nintendo.

The DS has been a huge success for handhelds and the Wii is following this trend for consoles. Shops are still selling out of them as they come in.

Pokemon, Nintendogs, etc as well as the amount of systems sold is crazy.
They certainly know what they are doing

Good as well. While Microsoft, at least in public, have shown support for Nintendo (or at least respect) Sony have continued their attempts to try and demean and destory Nintendo. They were quite pleased with the demise of Sega but this cost them a lot of goodwill and their snipes at the Wii and DS have been childish.

But Nintendo have recovered more than anyone expected. Its excellent. I was really worried a while back with the release of the PSP, All the press where pointing to the success of the Playstation and saying how Sony would destory the Game Boy, but the DS blew it away. Its incredible that the PSP hardly features in the mind of the public compared with the DS and with good reason. Its an amazing console, one of the best ever in my view.

Now they are doing the same with the Wii, while we need to wait and see if the sales will actually relate to more software sales as the consoles matures is the big issue now. Without a lot of software the console will fall and in turn the software support will dry up. Thankfully the Wii is cheap and easy to develop for and the amazing sales of the units means that developers are going crazy to develop for it. Cheap to produce, large market. The only question will be that if a 'new' audience is whats causing the Wii sales will this mean they will buy software at a rate the 360/ps3 owners will? I think the sales will be less but made up for by the high number of Wii consoles out there and that developers can actually make a profit on a Wii game.

Time will tell but developers love it, the public seem to love it. And its heading for 1st place. (anyone got sales figures?)

Nintendo is a resounding victory for gameplay over graphics. Yay!