Nintendo President Satoru Iwata has already said he won't step down amid the company's recent poor market performance, but that doesn't mean he and other Nintendo executives aren't feeling some of the company's pain. Nintendo has announced (as reported by the AP) that Iwata will take a 50-percent pay cut for five months starting in February. Two high-level directors, including storied Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto, will take 30-percent pay cuts, while seven members of Nintendo's board will see their pay reduced 20 percent.
The move comes as Nintendo confirms what the company warned of with its severely reduced sales projections earlier this month. In 2013, the Wii U sold just 2.8 million units worldwide. That's down from 3.06 million units it sold to early adopters in fewer than three months when it launched in 2012, showing a worrying lack of momentum for a system that is facing new competition from the likes of the PS4 and Xbox One.
On the portable side, the 3DS is doing considerably better than its home console counterpart. Nintendo pushed out 12.7 million units of the system during the last nine months of 2013, including over 5 million in Japan alone. That number sounds less impressive, though, when you compare it to the 24.5 million the Nintendo DS sold during a similar nine-month stretch in its third full year on the market.
This speaks more of the record-setting market performance of the original DS than anything particularly lacking in the 3DS' sales. Still, when looked at as a generation-to-generation trend, the downward trajectory isn't heartening.
To put Nintendo's current console/portable dichotomy in some stark relief, consider that a game that sold to every Wii U owner in existence through 2013 would still have barely half the sales of 3DS mega-hit Pokemon X/Y, which has attracted 11.6 million sales so far. Even a mid-range 3DS game like Animal Crossing: New Leaf, with 3.52 million sales worldwide, was able to outsell the Wii U in 2013.
Despite all this, Nintendo still managed to show a modest ¥10.2 billion ($99 million) profit for the last nine months of 2013. That's down from ¥14.55 billion ($141.7 million) in the same period in 2012, though, and Nintendo expects it won't be enough to carry it to profitability for the entire fiscal year, which ends in March. That would be the third such fiscal year loss in a row for a company that turned consistent profits for decades before this recent lull. It will take a while for such losses to eat through the company's massive reserves of cash on hand, but given the Wii U's poor start, Nintendo's current trajectory seems unlikely to turn around any time soon.
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