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Old school gaming giant, Nintendo, has drastically cut its profit forecast pointing the finger to weaker than expected sales of its new Wii U console. The Japanese company has said it now expects to make an operating loss of 35bn yen for the year end, this is against a previous forecast of a 100bn yen profit.
The struggling video game maker made a 36.4bn yen loss last year. Nintendo has also forecasted that sales would be worse then last year (590bn yen compared with 635.4bn yen in 2013). The company has said that a slower then expected uptake of both the Nintendo 3DS handset and the Wii U console were to blame for the loss; as well as the knock on effect this had on video game sales in general. The company hacked its estimates for Wii U sales in the year from 9 million to 2.8 million.
President of Nintendo, Satoru Iwata, said sales of the console had picked up towards the end of the year thanks to discounting but admitted that it still “fell short of our targeted recovery by a large margin.” The follow-up console to the original and massively popular Wii console faced tough competition in the key Christmas holiday sales period from Microsoft’s new console, Xbox One and Sony’s next generation console, Playstation 4.
Once a pioneer in video gaming, Nintendo has struggled to maintain its reputation in the gaming field since the launch of the Wii console in 2006 whilst Microsoft and Xbox have ensured their dominance in the games console market. Unfortunately, casual gamers, who are one of Nintendo’s key markets, have largely migrated over to Smartphone and tablet gaming.
[Image via news.dice]