Investor meeting: Nintendo talks about digital sales

During the usual meeting with investors, which always follows the presentation of the latest financial results, Nintendo talked about its digital sales. First, a graph was shown: it compares sales for the past few Fisal Year (from Q1 to Q3 for 2015-16). It shows just how much digital sales have grown, especially in 2015.

Through Q1 to Q3 2015-16, total digital sales topped 30.5 billion yen: that’s almost as much as during the full Fiscal Year 2014-15 (the best year so far), and there’s still one quarter left! According to Nintendo, this increase is mainly due to add-on content (for games such as Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and Nintendo 3DS, and Mario Kart 8).

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The following graph shows the breakdown of digital sales by region. We can see clearly how much sales have grown in each region, and particularly in the Americas (Japan and Europe had much more moderate increases). The Americas account for about half of total digital sales for Nintendo.

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Finally, Tatsumi Kimishima revealed which downloadable content was the most popular (excluding digital version of retail games). Unsurprisingly, DLC for Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and Nintendo 3DS were pretty popular, along with the Mario Kart 8 DLC. It’s for this reason that Nintendo plans to keep on releasing attractive additional content for its games: not only they make a lot of money, but they also allow Nintendo to maintain a high usage rate and make sure the games remains in the spotlight.

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Source: Nintendo