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Plezbo on 03 May 2012
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Soleron said:


No, 3DS is still selling at a loss. They expect the crossover point to be August, and they expect to be in the red next quarter too.

Why would Nintendo be spending much on R&D? Wii U was ready to go minus the final component versions at E3, all the money spent on developing the expensive parts (CPU, GPU, Tablet) would already have been spent by then. If anything this should be a quiet period in Nintendo's R&D, they just finished lauching the 3DS's main software and an expensive home Zelda.

I'm not worried about Nintendo, their cash position is good. But if they continue to be in the red, investors will want a change of direction or a change of management. And I personally want that to happen as soon as possible, because the current direction isn't producing any games I want to play (own only 1 3DS game and will not buy Wii U, compare to 100+ Nintendo games and 8 Nintendo consoles I own).


Um. because you need to pay for the systems to be manufactured.  So figure 4-5 million ready to go by launch, figure their costs are around $200 a system, and that is around a billion dollars right there.  And that is being generous since they probably had to fork over money to re-tool factories, etc. If the console is to truly debut this holiday season they should already be through most of the initial run of production soon.  Figure that by mid-summer, the allocation for launch will already be finished and the second wave will be in production.  Marketing, game developement, and all sorts of other costs atributed to a game console release drive that figure higher.    

I read somewhere that they hit the break even point in March with 3DS.  I don't have any concrete fact to go off of here, so I won't argue this point, you are very possibly right on that.   However, selling 5 million+ of Mario Kart 7 and Mario 3D Land worldwide has definitely helped things, nothing like first party software sales to drive profits.   I think this is the true reason that they didn't see profits, where were the first party games in the past year?  

As far as their management, if this launch doesn't do well, I would not want to be Iwata.  Yamaguchi-san will hand him the short blade and expect 3 horizontal slices if this thing is a debacle.