Nintendo is set to end the year with a bang, as the company celebrates record-high sales of the latest Pokémon games and the release of a new iOS game.
Over 240,000 copies of Nintendo’s new 3DS games Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon were sold in Australia and New Zealand in less than two weeks, becoming the fastest-selling games in the history of the company in the two countries.
The immense popularity of Pokémon Go earlier in the year played a significant role in the high sales, which were 67 per cent higher than the last games in the Pokémon series. Released in 2014, Pokémon Omega Ruby and Pokémon Alpha Sapphire were also the previous fastest-selling games for the company in Australia and New Zealand.
Nintendo will be looking to emulate the recent success of the Pokémon brand with a new game based on the company’s popular character Mario.
Super Mario Run, which is set for release in the Apple App Store next week, takes the classic mechanic of Mario running through a 2D landscape to a simple smartphone game.
Part of the game will be free to play, but Nintendo will charge $14.99 for access to the whole game. It remains to be seen if this model of a one-off charge, rather than the typical model used in smartphone games of multiple smaller payments, will be as successful as Nintendo hopes.
The company will be looking to continue this momentum into early next year, with the release of the Nintendo Switch console set for March 2017.
Nintendo’s current console, the Wii U, hasn’t achieved the kind of success experienced by the company’s last console.
The Wii, released in 2006 and discontinued in 2013, sold over 100 million consoles over its lifetime, compared to about 13 million Wii U consoles sold since late 2012. This puts it in third position behind Microsoft’s Xbox One at 30 million units and Sony’s PlayStation 4, which recently reached a milestone of over 50 million units sold.
Super Mario Run will be available for iPhone and iPad in the Apple App Store on December 15, with an Android release expected next year. Nintendo also plans to release more games and apps in the future.
