Nintendo has received a Black Friday boost after a black year for sales – shifting more than 500,000 Wii consoles on the biggest shopping day of the year in the US.
Sales of the 3DS handheld console have also been booming, due to a new Mario game, bundling offers and a precipitous price cut.
The Wii figures are the most surprising. Now in its sixth holiday season, interest had been apparently waning, with Microsoft and Sony reducing the prices of their rival consoles – the Xbox 360 and PS3 – to make them more competitive and buyers aware that a new machine – the Wii U – is around the corner in 2012.
But the Wii had its biggest Black Friday ever, with unit sales up 22 per cent on last year.
The release of Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword last week certainly helped. It is the fastest selling in the popular series, with 535,000 units sold over the past week.
Zelda was not bundled with the Wii, although there were some promotions by individual retailers, Reggie Fils-Aime, Nintendo US president, told me, such as Walmart’s $99 Wii, sold without any software.
“I think we’re speaking to the late adopter looking for a value price and a great range of software titles, titles that appeal to more active [regular] gamers like Zelda and Call of Duty,” he said.
Nintendo is perennially criticised for not encouraging enough titles from third-party publishers to boost its hardware sales, but Mr Fils-Aime pointed out Ubisoft’s Just Dance 3 was top of the video game charts on Amazon currently and Activision’s Skylanders was doing “extremely well”.
He is also convinced there is still plenty of life in the Wii, despite the impending arrival of the Wii U.
“We absolutely believe that the Wii has many more units to sell, not only for the balance of this holiday, but for 2012,” he said.
“We expect the Wii to continue to sell side-by-side with the Wii U, because they will appeal to different consumers, they’ll have different games to support them and so we’re quite confident we’ll be able to continue the momentum for Wii.”
For the 3DS, Super Mario 3D Land was launched on November 13, boosting hardware sales that week by 49 per cent on the previous week and by 325 per cent last week over the week of November 6.
The game is the fastest selling portable Mario title, with more than 500,000 units sold since launch.
The 3DS last week surpassed after just eight months the first-year sales of its DS predecessor, which sold 2.37m units in 12 months.
That makes it sound quite a success, but this has only come after Nintendo cut the March launch price of $250 to $170 in August. On Sunday, it will offer a pink version of the 3DS at $170 with a free game.
Stronger game releases early next year are expected to further boost a console that struggled early on and Nintendo maintained its estimates in October for full fiscal year sales (ending March 31 next year) of 16m units worldwide. However, revenue forecasts for the year were lowered from Y900bn ($11.5bn) to Y790bn ($10.1bn).
Meanwhile, video game analysts at Cowen and Company have taken a less optimistic view of Nintendo’s software sales, based on a study of Amazon.com Thanksgiving statistics, which they say have been a good leading indicator of December sales in the past.
While Just Dance 3 for the Wii was the top-selling game, it was one of only two titles for the platform in the Top 20, compared to nine in 2010.
Cowen’s note predicts unsurprisingly that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 from Activision and EA’s Battlefield 3 and Madden NFL 12 will be among the top-selling games for the holiday season.
