Nintendo Loses $97 Million In Last Quarter

Nintendo released their quarterly results and it's not looking too good for the company. After the successful launch of Mario Kart 8 and managing to reignite some of the luster for the Wii U within the marketplace, it still wasn't quite enough to completely turn around Nintendo's financial position.

Joystiq managed to get their hands on Nintendo Japan's financial sheet and they are reporting that the company only managed to ship 510,000 stock keeping units of the Wii U in the last quarter, which was less than what they may have wanted.

Nevertheless, 510,000 is definitely far better than what the company had achieved during the same period last year. In fact, between the three-month quarter in 2013 Nintendo had only managed to ship 160,000 Wii U SKUs, putting both the system and the company on the fast-track to receiving nothing but doom and gloom articles as publishers had pulled support early in the Wii U's life-cycle and delayed ports, poorly made multiplatform games and lots of unexpected hiccups have caused the system to falter on the marketplace until Nintendo releases their first-party games, similar to what happened when they finally put out Mario Kart 8.

The game managed to sell 2 million copies and keep Satoru Iwata as Nintendo's president. The game nearly single-handedly turned around Nintendo's fortune with the Wii U, as the company leveraged the game's sales with a very strong showing at this year's E3 by rolling out tons of big announcements, as well as hosting a Treehouse live event so gamers got to see all the big games coming out for the Wii U live and in action. What's more is that Nintendo gained lots of favor from fighting game community when they hosted the Super Smash Bros. tournament for the Wii U.

Nevertheless, it wasn't enough to completely change up the financial end-game for the company, as the company incurred a 9.924 billion yen net loss, which equates to $97.2 million in USD. As of June 30th, Nintendo made it known that they had shipped 6.68 million Wii U units. According to VG Chartz they've sold through around 6.7 million units, which either means VG Chartz are slightly over estimating the sales, the Wii U has sold its total shipments and Nintendo will need to ship more, or the June 30th numbers are just old (which is likely, given the uptick in Wii U sales in Japan recently).

Of course, in the long game the company still has some pretty big aces up their sleeves, and they knew they couldn't simply bank on Mario Kart 8 all by its lonesome to recover the company. Thankfully, they have a full slate of games due out at the end of this summer and throughout the fall, including second party titles like Bayonetta 2 and Hyrule Warriors.

There are also rumors that Nintendo's big move will come this holiday season in the form of a potential price-cut and a bundle with Super Smash Bros and the Amiibo, Nintendo's foray into the NFC figurine market.

The real tell about the company's market and sales data will be when they finish out 2014 and we get a clear picture as to how well the marketing played to the company's benefit as well as some of their new ventures, such as the Amiibo line.