It's a bit cryptic, but this is about as much info as you're ever going to get. 

http://wii.ign.com/articles/838/838286p1.html

Virtual Console Numbers Revealed
Well, one number, at least.
by Anoop Gantayat

November 28, 2007 - A tiny bit of extremely rare insight into Nintendo's Virtual Console sales status was provided today at a press conference held in Tokyo by Nintendo and NTT to formalize their upcoming business tie-up for Internet service.

During a Q&A session following the press conference, Nintendo's Shinji Hatano fielded a question regarding the current success of the Virtual Console service. In addition to reiterating a past figure of 7.8 million downloads so far, he revealed that the service has generated 3.5 billion yen (approximately $33 million) in sales.

The Nintendo executive said of these figures, "We're currently unsure if this is a lot or low. They're not bad figures."

Unless Nintendo decides to completely open up and give out full download numbers for their Virtual Console titles, vague figures like this are as good as it's going to get.

Anyone out there want to try extrapolating estimates on per-game downloads based on the two figures?

That's 33/7.8 = $4.23 average...Which means it must be including free channels like the Metroid Prime 3 promo.

Nintendo get 30% of it right?....although that would be 30% of any non-Ninty games, so they probably get more like 50%.
so $16million....seems like a small amount to me.

anyhoo i have no idea how anyone can get a breakdown of sales figures from that.

actually those numbers are incredibly weird..... assuming both numbers are from the same date (which was a few months ago from the 7.8 number)

then the average download costs less than $5....how did that work out when NES games cost you in America $5, and here in Europe NES games cost £3.50 ($7) or whatever equivalent in Euros.

For this to be true the Japanese must pay much less for VC...and also buy more to drag the average down, and NES games must be most popular by far.

EDIT, blast superchunk was faster and had an explanation.

That... doesn't seem right at all.

They did state 7.8m VC downloads --> I don't believe this includes FREE channels.

The CHEAPEST VC you can buy is 500pts? (is there anything less than this?) - which is $5US (yes? Its around $8AU). So how could the average be under say... $7?

Unless its Ninty portion of the sales - which would be too much, which also doesn't seem right.



(free channels - would have around 10m downloads on their own...)

Maybe 7.8m includes the web browser when it was free? Maybe 2m for that?

Probably has to do with exchange rates varying over time.

Well, it would have to do with either one of these numbers being way out of date, i.e. the $33 was for a smaller number than the 7.8m units.

OR the 7.8 downloads includes the free stuff.

OR the 7.8 is older WW downloads whereas the $33 million is new data for Japan only.

I think my last option is probably right.

^^^According to the article the 7.8 million is said to be old (although I'm not sure how old) but the $33 million isn't dated.

That would mean one of 3 things, 1) the $33 million is current which means something is really off with the numbers, 2) the $33 million is from the same time as the 7.8 million downloads which means something is off with the numbers, or 3) the $33 million figure is older than 7.8 million one which would make it really old and means something is off with the Nintendo guy using it but not the numbers.

No one of course knows the ratio of downloads by system to determine the real average price nor does anyone know how much Nintendo takes from each download. A fair estimate of the average price would be (10+8+6+5)/4 or about $7.25. Even if NES downloads were twice as much and N64 downloads half as much the average price would still be around $6.50. As for how much Nintendo gets, seeing as most downloads are on Nintendo platforms and the most downloaded games are 1st party I can't imagine Nintendo not taking at least 80-90%.

Seeing as I've blown past the point of grossly over-analyzing this I'll just conclude by saying I think the $33 million is either from 3-6 months ago, is just since March, or is only profit . For the first one, Nintendo hit 5 million or so downloads many months ago so the numbers work then. On the second possibility IIRC Nintendo had 3 million downloads until March and so would have had around 5 million this fiscal year which would suddenly make the $33 million sound correct. Or he could have meant profit and it was mistranslated. My own guess is he meant just this fiscal year.