The profit is pretty much all a result of favorable yen/dollar flucuations. Their actual game business is losing money.

It is better to show confidence in the market then admit they are worried about sales, if they said "hey, we think we may only sell 4 million WiiU's but we'll get there eventually with profit!" people would jump ship like there was no tomorrow.

Ok I really need someone to explain me how you can do operation loss and net profit at the same time. What does these things mean exactly? Are you in the green as soon as you do net profits? What does stockholder look at exactly?

Company's do it all the time though I suppose.

Think of it like this -- if you have a wife, and you know you have to tell her some really bad news. You can tell her now, sure.

Or ... you can wait say a month when you think you might have some good news coming in, and tell her then, lol.

Nintendo will fess up to their sales forecasts being unreachable next January or March, but by then hopefully they can also tell investors that the Wii U is doing better and Pokemon X/Y sold a ton of copies to cushion the blow.

Stockholders look at both.

Operating income is basically your income (loss or profit) from you actual business. So if you and me run a hot dog stand, our operating income is based on the money we make from the actual business of selling hot dogs. Lets say we made $50 this year from selling hot dogs. That's an operating profit of $50.

Net income is your company's income when everything else on top of operating income is taken into account. So things like currency flucuation, sale or purchase of factory equipment, maturation of corporate stocks/bonds, issuing of salary bonuses, etc. are taken into account. Lets say our net income turns out to be $25. But we made $50 from selling hot dogs right? Well lets say we also spent $25 during this period buying new hot dog making equipment, so factoring that in, our $50 profit from operating income becomes only $25 net income.

Operating income basically tells you how well a company's core business is doing.

Net income tells you overall how much profit or loss a company is taking in when other factors not related to the core business are factored in.

The 3DS profit comes at a loss of the WiiU losses, since the shortcomings of the WiiU's launch are a result of the 3DS development boost everything settles out.

You do realize Nintendo has different development teams on different projects right? It's not like, "Alright team, let's stop making Wii U software and instead make a lot of 3DS stuff... Now that that's done, lets do some more work on this Wii U Zelda title that we were putting off while we worked on Pokemon and Zelda Link to the Past 2."

Can someone explain a few things...

- Is the hardware numbers what has been sold to public or retails?
- And is there a reason why software hasn't been updated?

Lol, the 3DS's Q4 is marginally better than the PS3's worst Q4.

The 3DS is starting to fall waaaaaaaay behind the DS.

3DS 10th quarter (this recent one) April-June 2013 - 1.4 million shipped

DS 11th quarter (chose this one because it's the closest equivalent) April-June 2007 - 6.58 million shipped

That's a pretty huge gap.