Nintendo teams up with Pokemon Go creator for smartphone games

TOKYO - Japanese games giant Nintendo is teaming up with the US firm behind runaway hit Pokemon Go to develop augmented reality smartphone games, the two companies said Tuesday.

Their first joint venture will involve Nintendo's lovable half-vegetable, half-animal Pikmin characters in a game expected to launch sometime this year.

Augmented reality (AR) technology allows images and animations to be superimposed on the real-world view seen on a smartphone's rear camera.

It was key to the success of Niantic's Pokemon Go, which thrilled users around the world with the appearance of Pokemon characters in their neighborhoods across the globe.

"Niantic's AR technology has made it possible for us to experience the world as if Pikmin are secretly living all around us," Nintendo representative director Shigeru Miyamoto said in a press release.

Miyamoto, creator of Pikmin and other famed Nintendo characters including Super Mario and Donkey Kong, said the new app would be designed around "making walking fun."

Nintendo had in the past been reluctant to let its characters venture outside traditional consoles and into the increasingly popular world of smartphone gaming.

But in recent years, it has released a string of mobile titles, including 2016's "Super Mario Run" and 2019's "Mario Kart Tour."

"The deal could help address complaints among investors that Nintendo hasn't been able to earn much from smartphone apps," Hideki Yasuda, an analyst at Ace Research Institute, told Bloomberg News.

"As we continue to expand our games portfolio, it was a natural next step to team up with Nintendo," Niantic CEO John Hanke said in a joint press release.

"We're looking forward to shaping the future of AR together," he added, without offering details on which other Nintendo characters might be in line for AR games.

Pokemon Go has been hugely successful since its 2016 launch, earning more than a billion dollars in the first 10 months of 2020 alone, according to tracker Sensor Tower.

Agence France-Presse

Nintendo says nine-month profit up nearly 25%, lifted by strong titles

TOKYO, Japan — Nintendo said Thursday its net profit jumped nearly 25 percent for the nine months to December, riding out the crucial holiday season thanks to blockbuster game titles for its popular Switch console.

The Kyoto-based games giant said its bottom-line profit rose 24.9 percent to 168.8 billion yen ($1.6 billion) for the April-December period on sales of 997.3 billion yen, up 16.4 percent.

"During the holiday season, software was a great driver of hardware sales," the firm said in a statement.

For the year to March, it maintained its optimistic annual targets, expecting a net profit of 165 billion yen, up more than 18 percent from the previous fiscal year.

Its annual sales target also remained unchanged at 1.2 trillion yen.

Nintendo's latest portable console the Switch has become a huge global seller, helped by the release of innovative, family-friendly titles that have wowed critics and gamers alike.

Nintendo shares soared more than 15 percent in January on expectations that sales were solid for the Christmas shopping season.

source: philstar.com

GOTTA CATCH ‘EM SERVERS | Pokemon Go Australia log-in complaints grow

Growing numbers of Pokemon Go players in Australia, one of three countries where Nintendo Co’s smash-hit mobile game is available, are complaining they’re having trouble logging in, raising concerns the Japanese firm may not be able to roll the game out globally as quickly as planned.

Shares in Nintendo fell nearly 6 percent in Tokyo early on Wednesday after a three-day surge on the successful U.S. launch of the augmented reality game last week added 1.2 trillion yen ($11 billion) to the company’s market value. Based on the 1990s Japanese franchise, the augmented reality game topped Apple Inc’s free app charts.

By 0220 GMT on Wednesday, a total of about 1,300 Pokemon Go users had reported problems accessing the game in Australia over the last two days, according to website aussieoutages.com, which tracks digital service disruptions.

The game has only been released in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and Nintendo has said launches for other countries including Japan – one of the world’s biggest gaming markets – are due soon.

Both Nintendo and Niantic, which developed the game in tandem with Pokemon Co, declined to comment. Nintendo owns a third of Pokemon Co and has an undisclosed stake in Niantic.

Some gamers in Australia have speculated servers were overloaded because players in the United Kingdom, where the game is not yet available domestically, were trying to log on.

“When Pokemon Go servers experience issues, so do I,” a user with the handle @_emilymcc wrote in a post on the aussieoutages.com website.

The reported disruption adds to a flurry of headaches Nintendo is facing with Pokemon Go.

Security researchers raised concerns about the vulnerability of users’ data after finding that Pokemon Go players signing into the game via a Google account on an Apple operating system device unwittingly gave “full access permission” to Google accounts.

Meanwhile cases of armed robberies and injuries involving Pokemon Go players have also been reported.

source: interaksyon.com

Nintendo to stop making Wii console for Japan market

TOKYO — Japanese game console maker Nintendo said Wednesday it will stop making its Wii console for the Japanese market, but will keep producing it internationally.

The move to abandon the home console, which competes with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3, will allow Nintendo to focus its efforts on its successor.

“Our new generation Wii U console is already on the market and allows users to play software originally designed for the Wii,” a Nintendo spokesman told AFP.

“So this is part of the transition of our products to new models,” he said.

The company will keep producing Wii for markets abroad including its cheaper version Wii mini, he said.

Since its release in 2006 Wii has sold more than 100 million units worldwide.

The Wii disrupted the world of consoles on its launch, with its emphasis on family-orientated gaming that made use of wireless controllers fitted with accelerometers.

These controllers, which sparked the production of games where players could actually mimic the body movements of a sport or playing a musical instrument, were widely copied.

Nintendo launched the Wii U console late last year, although analysts said a lack of games took away some of the fizz the company had been hoping for after its 3DS console saw disappointing demand abroad.

Nintendo, maker of the iconic Donkey Kong and Super Mario brands, has been locked in a war with Sony and Microsoft, makers of the PlayStation and Xbox video game consoles, for dominance of a sector worth about $44 billion a year.

Nintendo swung to a net profit of $88 million in the three months to June as a weakening yen helped inflate its overseas result.

source: interaksyon.com

Nintendo chief who built gaming empire dies at 85

TOKYO — Hiroshi Yamauchi, credited with transforming Nintendo from a family-owned Japanese business into a global byword for video games, died Thursday from pneumonia. He was 85.

Yamauchi was just 22 when he took over the family business from his ailing grandfather and he went on to head the firm for over half a century.

It was during his tenure — in 1983 — that Nintendo released a games console called the “Family Computer”, which laid the foundations for the modern video-game industry.

Known abroad as the “Nintendo Entertainment System”, the early console became an international phenomenon with the company’s global success skyrocketing on the back of the legendary Super Mario series.

A string of successful game software titles followed while the popular Game Boy hand-held console was released to popular acclaim in 1989.

Yamauchi, whose death was reported by Japanese media, was born in the ancient capital of Kyoto into a family that operated a maker of Japanese and Western playing cards.

He was a 22-year-old student at Tokyo’s Waseda University when he took over the family business in 1949.

Yamauchi started Japan’s first mass production of plastic playing cards and took the company public.

After running Nintendo for 53 years, Yamauchi stepped aside in 2002 as he brought in current chief Satoru Iwata.

Yamauchi’s death comes just two days after Eiji Toyoda, a member of Toyota’s founding family who oversaw the automaker’s global ascent and helped drive a revolutionary production process, died at the age of 100.

source: interaksyon.com

Wii U Launch Day Resource Round-Up

A new era of video game consoles kicked off at midnight with the launch of the Nintendo’s dual-screen wielding platform, the Wii U. Whether you’ve already run to the store and picked one up, or still aren’t sure whether you see a new Nintendo console in your future, you probably have a lot of questions about it: “What exactly can this thing do?” “What games should I buy?” “Do I really need to download that day-one patch?”

First of all, the answers to those three answers are: ”Right now, it plays video games.” ”Generally, speaking stick to console exclusives like Super Mario Bros U. and ZombiiU.” Lastly; “Technically no, but without the patch you won’t be able to play online, buy games via Nintendo’s E-Shop, or play Wii games, among other things.” Those answers, however, barely scratch the surface of everything you should know about the platform, so we’ve compiled a list of resources so you can all of the answers you need.

1. A Nintendo history lesson, as a prologue to the Wii U (Wired)
2. What can Wii U do before you download that massive day-one patch? (Polygon)
3. A complete list of every Wii U game available today and in the near future (GamesRadar)
4. How To: Transfer your Wii game saves to your Wii U (IGN)
5. An inside look at the guts of the Wii U gamepad (Twitch.TV)
6. Nintendo’s terms of service for MiiVerse are hilarious (Kotaku)
7. Jeff Ryan, author of Nintendo’s corporate biography, picks apart the Wii U (Kill Screen)

Now that many of your questions have been answered, (we hope) it’s time to tackle the big question: Should you buy a Wii U? Reviews of the console have been a mixed bag. Positive or negative, every review so far comes with a serious caveat; that Nintendo’s inability to ship a fully-functional console isn’t indicative of a company that will make good on their promises of significantly improved third-party support and comprehensive online features. While Joystiq’s JC Fletcher liked what he saw, but concedes that the console “doesn’t feel exactly like the ‘next generation.’” One of the few scored reviews from a gaming site, Polygon gave the box a 6.5 out of 10.

Interestingly enough, hardware-centric tech sites like Gizmodo and TechCrunch have generally been a little more lenient than their gaming counterparts, though they’ve taken issue with their own set of problems. Both The Verge and Engadget, for example, are concerned with the quality of the gamepad’s construction.

For all the negativity, however, there was also plenty of optimism about the console’s core features. Apparently the act of “cutting the cord” and playing Wii U games solely on the portable gamepad screen works so well, that some reviewers may prefer playing games that way. Kotaku editor-in-chief Stephen Totilo, calling the console “a bold new player” is excited that Nintendo has finally made a machine that has the same features as the competition, while showing the potential to become something more.

In the end, the thing that will determine whether or not you buy a Wii U, at least this year, will be your love Nintendo and their games. As with the Wii, the best thing Nintendo has to offer right now is the promise of their own unique games. Though that may change as more features and new games become available, as of today the Wii U is a Nintendo product for Nintendo people.


source: geekosystem.com

Nintendo prices Wii U above PlayStation3 and Xbox in Japan

TOKYO — Nintendo Co will sell its latest game console, the Wii U, in Japan starting at 26,250 yen ($340) as the creator of Super Mario looks to regain the lead in gaming from Sony and Microsoft and fend of tablet and smartphone makers led by Apple Inc.

In addition to the basic 8 gigabyte model Nintendo will sell a 32 GB version at 31,500 yen, both from December 8, Nintendo’s president, Satoru Iwata said in a webcast on Thursday. The Japanese company will reveal prices and the launch date for the U.S. market at an event in New York starting at 1400 GMT.

Nintendo is fielding the successor to its hit Wii console in the busy year-end shopping season, going up against Sony Corp’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Corp’s Xbox 360. Current prices on entry-level consoles from those two makers in Japan are 24,980 yen and 19,800 yen.

The original Wii took the gaming world by storm in 2006 to become the world’s biggest selling home console, with motion-controlled gaming and a slew of software titles that appealed beyond a core of traditional gamers.

What became a 100 million machine bonanza for Nintendo is waning. In the three months to June 30, sales of its Wii game machines more than halved to 710,000 from 1.56 million a year earlier.

Supporting two “GamePad” controllers designed to look and function like tablets, the Wii successor, the first new console from Nintendo in six years, will come with a social-gaming network function dubbed “Miiverse” installed and will be its first machine in 16 years to launch with a dedicated “Super Mario” game title.

Apple challenge

Repeating the Wii’s success, however, will be tough as Nintendo contends not only with Microsoft and Sony, but tackles tablet and smartphone makers lead by Apple that are eating into the $78 billion gaming market.

Apple on Wednesday revealed its latest iPhone with bigger screen, better definition and a wireless function that allows users to view their smartphone images and games on TVs equipped with an Apple TV receiver.

For now, Nintendo, which began in 1889 making playing cards in the back streets of Kyoto, has a big enough cash pile built up during the Wii boom — about $14 billion — to stick with its hardware strategy.

However, if the Wii U fails to win over gamers amid a flood of tablets and smartphones, it may, say analysts, have to consider leveraging its software assets by letting Super Mario roam across devices built by other companies.

The console, unveiled in June, is available in black and white and has a 6.2-inch touch screen that includes a stylus. The GamePad controller has traditional buttons with left and right analog sticks. It will carry video content from Netflix Inc , Amazon.com Inc , Google Inc’s YouTube and Hulu.

Nintendo has said 23 new Wii U titles, including Nintendo Land, are in development. Third-party titles include Mass Effect 3 from Electronic Arts, Darksiders II from THQ and Ubisoft’s exclusive Wii U title Zombi.

source: interaksyon.com

Nintendo posts first-ever annual loss

TOKYO — Japanese game giant Nintendo on Thursday posted its first-ever annual loss since becoming a public company, blaming a soaring yen and price cutting on its consoles.

The Kyoto-based company said it lost 43.2 billion yen in the fiscal year through March, reversing a year-earlier profit of 77.62 billion yen, although the result was not as bad as the 65 billion yen loss it had forecast this year.

The firm went public in the early 1960s, according to its website.

Nintendo said sales dropped 36.2% from the previous year to 647.65 billion yen, adding that it “could not recover from a sales slump of Nintendo 3DS consoles in Europe and in the United States in the early fiscal year.”

For its current fiscal year, Nintendo forecast a return to profit, booking earnings of 20 billion yen on sales of 820 billion yen.

The company in August cut the price of its new Nintendo 3DS console from 25,000 yen to 15,000 yen in Japan, followed by similar reductions overseas as it struggled to boost sales going into the key Christmas season.

But the move failed to make up for the poor take-up seen earlier in the year, as the company battles tough competition from smartphones, tablet computers and social networking websites.

source: japantoday.com