Nintendo ‘studying’ mobile devices in wake of bleak hardware sales forecast
“It's not as simple as enabling Mario to move on a smartphone.” — Earlier today Nintendo slashed its sales forecast for the Wii U by nearly 70 percent, which in turn led the company to predict an operating loss of around $336 million.
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands at the end of a two-year slide the corpus has tracked since mid-2012: Nintendo posted a $132M operating loss as Wii sales collapsed in July 2012, months after Reuters framed the company's dilemma as hard choices for a soft landing. The January 2014 cut — a Wii U forecast slashed roughly 69 percent and a projected operating loss near $336 million — is the sharpest data point yet in that arc.
The mobile signal is the notable new element: Nintendo says it is 'studying' smartphones, while insisting 'it's not as simple as enabling Mario to move on a smartphone.' Per available reporting that study remains an unconfirmed signal, not a committed strategy. One complicating fact from the same week: the 3DS outsold both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in December 2013 NPD figures, so the weakness is console-specific, not franchise-wide.
First-order effects
- Nintendo absorbs a projected ~$336 million operating loss for the fiscal year after cutting the Wii U forecast by nearly 70 percent, putting immediate pressure on management to justify the console roadmap to investors.
- The 'studying mobile' statement — still unconfirmed as policy — marks the first crack in Nintendo's long-standing refusal to put first-party franchises like Mario outside its own hardware.
Second-order effects
- If Nintendo ever licenses its IP to smartphones, Apple and Google's stores would gain the industry's most valuable first-party catalog, forcing Sony and Microsoft to defend their own exclusivity arguments.
- A credible mobile pivot creates an internal conflict for Nintendo: the 3DS led December US hardware sales, so pushing games onto phones risks cannibalizing the one business currently working.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward a structural test of the console model itself — hardware sold at a loss to anchor exclusive software — as the audience migrates to devices Nintendo doesn't control.
- For the broader industry, Nintendo's decision path becomes the reference case for whether legacy platform holders can monetize IP across platforms without destroying the hardware flywheel that funds their studios.
The trend: Dedicated console makers are being pushed, one disappointing hardware cycle at a time, toward treating their franchises as portable IP rather than exclusives tied to proprietary devices.