| oniyide said: you know for a fact Ninty was profitable? how profitable? Sony wasnt at the time? 50% is nothing to be proud of sure. BUt PS3 still sold alot more than N64. What is the baseline for failure? numbers wise? anything above 30mil? |
Nintendo's Financials for the year March 1998 to March 1999 show a profit of 86 billion yen. This, adjusted for time and exchange as best as I can quickly estimate which may not be accurate, is in a general sense about $798 million today. FY ending March 2000 - 56 billion yen ($510 million?). For March 2001 (before GCN, only one week into GBA in Japan) profit was 96.6 billion yen ($890 million?).
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2001/010524e.pdf
That's the oldest historical data I can find for them at the moment. Nintendo took a small loss on N64 hardware but games gave profit.
Sony made a lot of money in the 90s, I wasn't debating that. Now I guess is a different story. A large 179 billion yen profit FY ending March 1999. 121.8 billion yen March 2000, but March 2001 the entire company profit was down to 16 billion yen (this year had PS2 selling worldwide, too). Problem is I can't tell what the gaming division profited. They have revenue reported for it those years, though, so here's a comparison.
Sony Game Division vs. Nintendo Minus Playing Card Division Revenue Comparison (billion yen)
| FY End | Nint. | Sony |
| 1997 | 416 | 408 |
| 1998 | 532 | 700 |
| 1999 | 570 | 760 |
| 2000 | 527 | 630 |
| 2001 | 458 | 646 |
Essentially, 40% of revenue generated by gaming was still Nintendo. So they had revenue and profit. The baseline for failure isn't standard. It depends on how much profit you want as a company. Anything unprofitable obviously fails. Nintendo I'm sure was planning and hoping for more success, so perhaps you could call N64 a failure, but it wasn't really bad. Good enough for them to try again, and good enough for them to generate a whole load of new young fans, which counts in long term business.
N64 almost matched SNES in North America, actually. 20.6 million units. Japanese sales, only 5.5 million, held it way back.
Edit: I found all Nintendo's historical records with their new FY 2014 release.
