Last month, when Nintendo announced it had quickly sold more than two million copies of Mario Kart 8, we noted that we'd have to wait to see if those sales were coming primarily from existing Wii U owners or if the game was driving new console sales on its own. Nintendo's latest quarterly earnings report shows that while Mario Kart 8 has led to an increase in Wii U hardware sales, it wasn't nearly enough of a boost to return the company to profitability.
Worldwide, Nintendo sold 510,000 units of the Wii U in the three months from April to June. That's a substantial improvement from the tepid 160,000 it sold during the same period last year and a smaller bump from the 310,000 it sold during the January to March quarter of 2014. But those kinds of numbers aren't going to help the Wii U look like a real contender with competition like the PlayStation 4, which was selling a million consoles a month as recently as April, or even the Xbox One, which shipped just over one million consoles in the first quarter of 2014 (though, to be fair, neither competitor has broken out current console sales numbers for the second quarter of the year).
The improved console hardware sales weren't enough to bump Nintendo back to the profitability it has been seeking to reclaim for years now, either. The company reported a ¥9.4 billion operating loss for the quarter (about $92 million), even worse than the ¥4.9 billion (about $47 million) quarterly loss from a year prior. Nintendo attributes that loss partly to the lack of new Wii U software to go along with the success of Mario Kart 8. Indeed, in North America, the Wii U saw just five new games released during the three-month period, and Mario Kart 8's 2.82 million sales represented a full 64 percent of the total Wii U software sales for the quarter. That's even more striking when you consider that Mario Kart was only out for a month during the reporting period.
The 3DS also showed a bit of sales softness in the latest financial report, selling just 820,000 units in the quarter. That number is down from 1.4 million in the same quarter a year ago but up from 590,000 in the first quarter of 2014. Regardless, the more than 44 million 3DS units sold so far ensure the platform will continue to have robust support from both developers and players.
That's not enough to carry Nintendo to profitability on its own these days, though. While Mario Kart 8 is definitely a step in the right direction, it's going to take more than a single system seller to revive the Wii U's fortunes, and thus Nintendo's, in the marketplace.
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