In 2002 a group of friends in Italy started developing an action-platformer with RPG elements for Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance handheld. Then 22 years passed and now, in 2024, Kien is finally launching on GBA, ending one of the longest delays in video game history.
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Over the decades, there have been numerous games with protracted development cycles and delayed releases. One of the most famous is Duke Nukem Forever, which was first announced in 1997 but didn’t end up shipping until 2011, nearly 15 years later. But Kien took even longer to finally arrive.
As reported by The Guardianand Patricia Hernandez (former EIC of Kotaku), Kien was developed by a small group of friends in Italy back in 2002. None of them had experience making games. But for the next two years, the pals worked extremely hard to develop Kien, taking very few breaks and crunching a lot. After a few years of development, the game was finished and ready to be published. However, the high costs of shipping the game on Game Boy carts and the risk that Kien might not be successful led to no publisher wanting to release the game.
GameTrailers / Incube8
Eventually, only one member of the original development team remained: game designer Fabio Belsanti. Despite believing in the unpublished game, he moved on with his life, founded a new development company, and began creating educational games for kids and teens. Through it all, though, Belsanti never gave up hope for Kien. When he noticed recently that retro games and consoles were popular again, he decided to return to Kien and give it another chance.
“I believe we are in a phase similar to [the revival of] vinyl or cassettes for music,” Belsanti told The Guardian, “a return to previous, more primitive forms of the medium driven by nostalgia from the generations who lived those eras, and curiosity by those who came after such technology.”
Belsanti teamed up with Incube8, a publisher focused on releasing and supporting new games for classic consoles, like the GBA. Incube8 was a perfect fit for Kien and in June it finally launched, 22 years after development had started on the action-platformer.
“On a romantic level, the thought of releasing the game on its original console is simply magical,” said Belsanti. “To see Kien come to life on the very platform it was designed for is a dream come true.”
Kien is out now. You can pick up a physical version of the game for Game Boy Advance or buy a digital version that you can play on an emulator.
The announcement that Nintendo Switch Online’s Game Boy Advance range is to receive RPGs Golden Sun and Golden Sun: The Lost Age is incredibly welcome news. But there are still some absolutely colossal gaps, some all-time great GBA games that we’d love to play on our Switches. Nintendo! Hear our pleas!
In a new press release from audio electronics company Altec Lansing, it was revealed that GameShark is returning, sort of via an artificial intelligence-powered successor called “AI Shark” You don’t care about that. Instead, the big news out of this press release is that it might have leaked the release date for the Nintendo Switch 2. – Zack Zwiezen Read More
While the Nintendo Switch receives big, proper updates on a fairly regular basis, it also sometimes gets more quieter downloads, ones that take place without the user knowing or needing to do anything. Those updates tend to focus on the console’s ‘banned word list’.
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Nintendo maintains a “bad word” list to prohibit Switch users from making accounts that reference certain phrases that might be considered controversial or offensive. In 2020 the list was updated to add “Nazi,” “Slave,” “KKK,” “ACAB,” and “Covid,” among others. Throughout 2022 it grew to encompass more slurs, rude language, and various misspellings of Hitler.
In February, words like “ISIS”, the conservative catch-all “groomer” and the names of the Sandy Hook shooter were added as part of changes discovered and published by longtime Switch dataminer OatmealDome, who earlier today tweeted that the list had been updated yet again.
“A rebootless update for 16.0.3 is out”, they wrote. “The sole changes are to the bad words lists. It appears Nintendo focused on blocking corruptions of the name Hitler (for example: “titler”, “hizzler”)“.
It appears the word ‘TERF’ (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) has also been included, perhaps suggesting the delayed Switch version of Hogwarts Legacy is getting closer to release.
Remember, this isn’t just a general list of words Nintendo don’t like, it’s specifically aimed at user account names, and so goes beyond just some rude, bad words. As OatmealDome points out in a follow-up:
The bad words lists shouldn’t be seen as just a list of slurs. It contains everything from “stoner” to “covid” to actual slurs. I would interpret it as “lists containing words related to controversial topics that aren’t appropriate for games that minors might play”.
If you’re wondering what other words the list contains, I’m glad you asked (especially if you’re a 10-year-old kid), because a selection of highlights include:
It is May 12, 2023, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom release day, and the temperature in New York City is creeping dangerously close to 90 degrees. In Midtown, bankers are sweating through their Brooks Brothers dress shirts and slacks, while tourists have busted out the cargo shorts. As I make my way out of the subway station near Rockefeller Center, I walk smack into a massive line of people. I sneer, assuming it’s the wildly long Nintendo Store line from more than a block away that our managing editor Carolyn Petit saw earlier this morning (I hate the idea of waiting in lines), but nope, the Jonas Brothers are at Rough Trade.
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Hours later, I head out to sit in the blazing sun for a bit to recharge my battery and notice the front of the Nintendo store looks conspicuously spacious. I hustle over, figuring I’ll snag a copy for someone else at Kotaku who wants to play (I do not). But as soon as I approach the front entrance to the building, which is on the corner of Rockefeller Plaza and 48th street, I realize the line is snaking down the adjacent street. It sits directly in the sun, many of the people waiting are visibly sweating.
At random intervals, a huge gap of bodies indicates the presence of a driveway, a few security guys making sure it remains open for cars passing through. Several future Tears of the Kingdom owners are hunched over playing Nintendo Switch. One woman is sitting on the sidewalk in shorts, a New York City no-no.
“Oh, fuck this,” I mumble before heading back to the dry, frigid air of the G/O Media offices. I may not be a big Zelda fan, but I don’t think there’s anything in the world that could make me wait hours on a line in Midtown Manhattan in the midst of a heatwave.
Zelda Tears of the Kingdom lines feel very nostalgic
Despite my beliefs, I’m fascinated to see people waiting in lines like this across the U.S. for the Breath of the Wild sequel. It feels sort of like a bygone era of gaming has returned—the last time I went to the midnight release of a game was November 2012 for Halo 4 at a Best Buy in Long Island, New York. I was 22 years old, and I was incredibly hyped.
The need to wait in long lines for midnight game releases has disappeared over the years, as more and more gamers turn to digital storefronts and downloads in order to get a new game the moment it releases, and the need for physical media wanes. (Though the side effects of a shift to entirely digital have been felt in the loss of access to so many movies—like sci-fi thriller Strange Days, which for some time was nearly impossible to watch without a physical DVD, only just becoming available to stream this year—and will undoubtedly soon affect games.) In 2012, you couldn’t play Halo 4 in any way other than on the two discs that came in the Master Chief-adorned case, but that’s simply not the case now.
What is it about Tears of the Kingdom that’s brought lines back in such a big way? After all, the Nintendo eShop is open 24/7, you can download the game right now without having to stand up for hours at a time, shuffling every 10 or so minutes a few inches closer to the shining glass Nintendo store doors. You can play Tears of the Kingdom right this second, no long-time exposure to stagnant, exhaust-filled NYC air required. Why, people in line, are you not doing this?
For many, the promise of special swag beckons. The Nintendo store has special-edition pins (and other “surprise giveaways”), many of which will undoubtedly end up on eBay for thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, Target has a fanny pack that people are freaking out over. The allure of impossible-to-get swag will always attract gamers, a group known to be completionists and collectors through and through.
But perhaps, despite my decidedly Grinch-y attitude about waiting in long lines for a video game, people are happily queuing for Tears of the Kingdom for the vibes, y’all. They’ve waited six years for a sequel to Breath of the Wild; what’s a few, sweaty hours more, especially in the company of your fellow die-hard fans?
There have been a lot of buggy blockbuster launches recently, but it doesn’t sound like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will be one of them. Nintento’s latest big exclusive for the Switch has impressed many reviewers so far with how it runs on the six-year-old hardware, with even Digital Foundry’s experts marveling at how it performs.
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Back when previews dropped for the game, it seemed like there might be some big concerns around framerate drops and handheld mode performance, with anecdotal reports of slow down when crafting complex vehicles or flying between floating islands. Digital Foundry reports, however, that a pre-release patch massively improved things, alleviating those concerns.
“It’s a game changer: nearly every instance of major performance loss has been corrected resulting in a game that now holds very closely to the 30 fps target,” senior staff writer, John Linneman, said in Digital Foundry’s YouTube analysis. “Nearly the entirety of my video capture managed to maintain a solid 30 fps, at least in most instances, which for the Switch, running a game this fast and mergent is downright impressive.”
There are still some dips, mostly around using Link’s new Ultrahand ability to combine objects into useful machines—when first initiated, the game briefly drops to 20 fps—and in busy areas like Kakariko Village. Linneman points out, however, that these moments are few-and-far-between so as not to make it a big issue.
Graphically, Tears of the Kingdom looks very similar to Breath of the Wild, despite the six years separating them. Still, there appear to be slight improvements in draw distance, shadows, and cloud and mist effects. The game also apparently loads around 30 percent faster on average when fast-traveling, according to Digital Foundry’s metrics.
Gif: Nintendo / Digital Foundry / Kotaku
Handheld mode also appears to fair pretty decently, too. While the maximum resolution is capped at 720p, and thus occasionally drops below the HD threshold, it apparently looks great on the OLED Switch screen, as one might expect. The framerate does drop more often, but doesn’t sound like a deal breaker.
Several other reviews have backed up this assessment, pointing out that Tears of the Kingdom’s performance on Switch is a far cry from the bug-ridden launches of other recent Nintendo published games like Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. “Nintendo got this extraordinary game running on a 10-year-old chipset, on hardware thinner than a small stack of beer coasters, in a device I can fit in my back pocket, and it only takes up 16GB of hard drive space?” said YouTuber SkillUp in his video. “Tears of the Kingdom is a technological miracle, and that is the story that deserves to be told far more than the occasional frame drop.”
The only disappointment seems to come from the fact that a Switch 2 or Pro model didn’t arrive in time for the game. Digital Foundry points to some of the major visual improvements teased back in Tears of the Kingdom’s first trailer back at E3 2019. The scene of Link and Zelda exploring a dark cave is how the finished game opens, but it doesn’t look nearly as good as in that first glimpse.
Nintendo says new hardware won’t arrive until 2024 at the earliest. Maybe when it does, we’ll get an enhanced version of Tears of the Kingdom. In the meantime, it sounds like it plays just fine on the older console.
In the wake of a massive hype wave following the latest The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom trailer, Nintendo has seemingly ratched up the number of rogue copyright claims it puts out against content creators on Youtube, and at least one of them is hitting back. In his latest video, Eric “PointCrow” Morino pleaded with Nintendo to leave his channel alone after it recently issued dozens of additional claims against his videos.
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“Please remove these strikes and claims or at least start a dialogue with us so we can all move forward with the excitement I’m sure you would love to see about your future games,” Morino said in a video to Nintendo posted on YouTube on April 14 that he said was vetted by his lawyer. The request comes after the Switch manufacturer apparently doubled down on issuing copyright claims and strikes against Morino’s channel, increasing the total number to 28, including ones against older videos that had nothing to do with Breath of the Wild, like one about Wii Sports.
Nintendo did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Nintendo first began targeting the Zelda speedrunner’s YouTube channel on April 6 after he uploaded footage of a Breath of the Wild multiplayer mod he commissioned and released to the public. Despite making videos featuring challenge runs and other modded content for years, it appeared to be the first time Nintendo signaled it took any sort of issue with the content. Morino posted about it on Twitter at the time, criticizing the move and calling on the publisher to reverse its decision.
He now says Nintendo has done the opposite, proceeding to copyright claim over 20 additional videos spanning his entire content making career. While most of them included the word “mod” in the title, at least one contained just vanilla gameplay with commentary. “These takedowns may have started with modded content, but they’ve spiraled into something else entirely,” Morino said in his latest video.
On April 23, another Zelda Youtuber, Croton, said 10 of their streams and two of their videos were “nuked” from the platform. “No answers, no context, just a copyright removal,” they tweeted. “And one of these videos has literally nothing to do with mods and was simply a Zelda challenge run.”
In his own video, Morino accuses Nintendo of flouting its content creator guidelines to target him, and defends his modded Breath of the Wild runs, which have collectively garnered tens of millions of views and helped maintain excitement around a game that’s now six years old. “To be clear I have never encouraged piracy of Nintendo’s games,” he said. “The mods I’ve commissioned are not being sold, and all of the code is custom, meaning they are free of Nintendo’s assets.”
At the exact time when many content creators are gearing up for a massive influx of interest from fans and viewers ahead of the release of Tears of the Kingdom next month, Morino’s now weary of making content for the game at all, lest the arbitrary copyright claims continue. “This is a little scary because the precedent that they set with this case may apply heavily for their upcoming release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom,” he said. “As per their decisions to take down challenge and gameplay videos alongside the modded content it will be difficult for any content creator to post creative concepts without having the fear of Nintendo exercising their copyright over video that is in line with their own policies.”
Morino initially planned to appeal the copyright claims, defending his videos on fair use grounds, but he now says those legal efforts could cost millions and could jeopardize the future of his over 1.6 million subscriber YouTube channel. He recently tweeted, “it’s hard to become excited for Tears of the Kingdom when the Zelda community is being nuked off YouTube.”
In March, an employee at a Massachusetts GameStop leaked on Reddit that Nintendo was probably about to reveal its long rumored special edition Zelda Switch at an upcoming mini-Direct for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Special editions such as these are highly coveted collector’s items, and news of one for the sequel to a best-selling game would be huge for fans looking to buy a new system. This week, GameStop fired the employee who leaked the news, and the employee claims he was told Nintendo helped make it happen.
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Back in March, Mike, who requested Kotaku only use his first name, posted a photo of a GameStop computer screen showing the inventory database had been updated with a secret new Switch model on the Tears of the Kingdom subreddit. It was the day before Nintendo’s big extended gameplay reveal for Tears of the Kingdom, and the employee speculated in the post that a special edition Zelda Switch which had already leaked back in December, would be announced during the stream. Mike says he got fired on April 11, about two weeks later.
In a phone interview with Kotaku, Mike said he made the leak because he was a big fan of the franchise and wanted to give others a heads up in case pre-orders went live that day. GameStop in particular has seen issues for buyers when it comes to preorders in the past, though this wasn’t a reason cited by Mike for the leak. On March 28, Nintendo did reveal a special edition Switch, and the following day pre-orders went live at GameStop and other retailers.
At the time, the Reddit post didn’t garner a ton of upvotes, and the now former employee said he didn’t think of it as a big deal since he didn’t technically leak any images or special details about the console itself, and the post itself was mostly speculative. Nintendo also tends to release special consoles such as this one for most of its major releases, such as Pokémon.
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But on April 5, a week later, Mike said the company traced the leak back to them. Coming in for his afternoon shift after watching the new Super Mario Bros. Movie on release day, he said his district manager called him into the backroom for a meeting. Joined by another GameStop supervisor via video conference, the employee said he was asked if he made the post and whether he knew it violated company policy.
Mike said he immediately confessed, but maintained he wasn’t aware it went against the company’s social media policies. The district manager took their keys and placed them on suspension, saying the final punishment could vary between a first-offense write up and termination. It ended up being the latter. And the now former employee thinks Nintendo is to blame.
When their store manager called on April 11 to deliver the bad news, he said the supervisor told them “off the record” that Nintendo had forced the company’s hand, demanding the employee be terminated over the leak. Mike shared the allegation on the Tears of the Kingdom subreddit shortly afterwards writing, “Hopefully all of you were able to get your switch pre-orders in as now I will not be able to get mine.”
GameStop and Nintendo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Image: Nintendo
Another employee at the store corroborated Mike’s account to Kotaku, and said they were told by the same store manager in a separate conversation that Nintendo was the catalyst. “He was an amazing worker,” they said of Mike, adding that he was one of the top performers in the area when it came to achieving GameStop’s aggressive sales goals.
Whoever ultimately made the decision to fire them, the leaker would have been easy to discover. Their social media accounts, including Instagram, Twitter, and Twitch, were linked in various ways to their Reddit account, and included several references to their general geographic location, as well as selfies. “I wasn’t really trying to cover my tracks because I didn’t know it would lead to this,” Mike told Kotaku.
As a large-scale retailer staffed mostly by entry-level workers paid terrible hourly rates, GameStop has historically been a hotbed for big gaming leaks, from Assassin’s Creed to Call of Duty. But it’s rare to hear that someone was actually fired in connection with one of the leaks. It’s perhaps less surprising that this one happens to have been in connection with a big Nintendo reveal, however. The Mario maker has been on the warpath against leaks for years, most recently attempting to subpoena Discord for the private data of someone who shared images from the Tears of the Kingdom collector’s edition artbook.
When asked if the former GameStop employee ultimately managed to secure a Zelda Switch pre-order, Mike confirmed he had. “But sadly I won’t be able to afford it anymore due to lack of a job,” he said. Mike added that when his manager had to deliver the bad news over the phone they pointed out what a shame it was: “This is your favorite company and now they hate you.”
YouTuber and speedrunner Eric “PointCrow” Morino released a brand new multiplayer mod for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on April 4. It basically transforms the hit 2017 Switch game into a modern open-world version of the beloved co-op Zelda spin-off Four Swords Adventures. A couple of days later, Morino says Nintendo hit him with copyright infringement claims that led some of his biggest YouTube videos to be demonetized.
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“Incredibly disappointed that Nintendo of America has decided to block my videos on Breath of the Wild,” he tweeted on April 6. “It’s the love for the community and the innovation that we bring to it that has kept it alive & brought new people to love the Zelda series. I hope you reverse your decision soon.” Morino also shared a screencap of several of his YouTube videos, including ones featuring gameplay footage from the multiplayer mod, showing they’d been flagged for copyright issues.
Nintendo didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Publishers maintain they have full ownership and control over any footage produced from their games, but they rarely seek to penalize YouTubers and other content creators for sharing it online and potentially profiting off of it. In fact most companies go out of their way to promote the sharing of footage and screenshots from their games to help spread awareness, increase sales, and cultivate a community of passionate fans.
When it comes to social media content around fan projects and mods, however, Nintendo is one company that’s often aggressively pushed back. Late last year, the Switch manufacturer went after a YouTube documentary about an abandoned pitch for a Zelda tactics spin-off, seeking to get it removed from Google’s platform. The creators eventually managed to appeal the decision and get it reversed.
In response to Morino’s post, several other big content creators chimed in. “Not good for them considering they’re releasing a new game soon and many content creators will popularize it even more and may choose not to create videos around it,” wrote Kittyplays. “Nintendo detected fans having fun and they can’t have that,” wrote LostPause. “This is sad given how much love and effort you given them and botw.”
Breath of the Wild is the fourth best-selling game on Switch, and has remained relevant years after its release in part due to the discoveries, tricks, and new stunts pulled off by people like Morino. Outside of the recent multiplayer mod, he’s drawn millions of additional eyeballs to the game with weird runs like Link growing bigger every time the A button is pressed, or trying to beat the game while both the hardest randomizer mode and the very difficult, map-changing Relics of the Past mod are active.
Morino didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment but tweeted that he’s currently appealing the decision with YouTube. “As of now, [the videos are still visible for you to watch—however, they are not monetized,” he wrote. “Hopefully Nintendo releases these claims, as I significantly transform their work and my videos are under fair use.”
The Nintendo GameCube was a weird little console, one that had all kinds of wacky add-ons and peripherals released for it over the years, from LAN adapters to Game Boy Links to bongo drums. One thing I never knew about until today, however, were the company’s plans for an official LCD screen.
Via Go Nintendo, Adam Doree has uploaded an uncut video of a presentation Nintendo made at E3 2002, featuring Shigeru Miyamoto, Satoru Iwata and Bill Trinen. In this video, after the crew had spent ages talking about Wind Waker and Metroid Prime, Iwata reveals that they have one last surprise to discuss: a first-party LCD screen, designed to attach to the top of the console and make it even more portable than it already was (the GameCube, famously, included a carrying handle on the back). I’ve set the video to autoplay at the beginning of the discussion about the screen:
I never knew this! Sure other companies have stepped into this vacuum over the years, releasing various screens of varying quality, but it would have been very cool to get an official Nintendo monitor.
It measured just five inches across, with a 4:3 ratio, and a resolution of just 320×240. Which sounds bad by 2023 standards but this was 2002, so for the time they weren’t terrible, as you can see in the footage above, where Mario Sunshine looks just fine! It’s also interesting hearing Iwata say it was peripherals like this that specifically convinced Nintendo to install digital output—itself a forgotten but amazing aspect of the hardware—for the GameCube.
Iwata even reveals that he had met with Sega’s Yuji Naka—in happier times—about Phantasy Star Online, and the pair discussed whether they could take that title and “make it a portable game” to make the most of this screen. None of which ever came to pass, of course, but it’s still neat imagining a GameCube era where you could have grabbed your console by its handle, taken it to a friends house and played Mario Kart Double Dash on your own little official Nintendo screen.
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Just because I’m only learning about this today doesn’t mean there isn’t other stuff out there about the screen; here’s a 2002 write-up on IGN about how nice it looked, for example, while its listing on Console Variations speculates that the high cost of LCD screens at the time made it too expensive to release. The video below, meanwhile, has a good linger on footage of the screen alongside some speakers, part of the most 2002 gaming setup imaginable.
E3 2002 – Nintendo Booth Footage
UPDATE: Thanks to Spindash on Twitter, there’s more! Satoru Iwata quietly revealed years later that the monitor had secret, glasses-free 3D capabilities that Nintendo “kept secret”, along with the trivia that the Phantasy Star Online figures visible in some of the display units ended up getting stolen off the showroom floor!
The organisers of the Smash World Tour have today announced that they are being shut down after Nintendo, “without any warning”, told them they could “no longer operate”.
The Tour, which is run by a third party (since Nintendo has been so traditionally bad at this), had grown over the years to become one of the biggest in the esports and fighting game scene. As the SWT team say:
In 2022 alone, we connected over 6,400 live events worldwide, with over 325,000 in-person entrants, making the Smash World Tour (SWT, or the Tour) the largest esports tour in history, for any game title. The Championships would also have had the largest prize pool in Smash history at over $250,000. The 2023 Smash World Tour planned to have a prize pool of over $350,000.
While this will be a disappointment to SWT’s organisers, fans and players, it has also placed the team in a huge financial hole, since so many bookings and plans for the events had already been made. As they say in the cancellation announcement:
We don’t know where everything will land quite yet with contracts, sponsor obligations, etc — in short, we will be losing hundreds of thousands of dollars due to Nintendo’s actions. That being said, we are taking steps to remedy many issues that have arisen from canceling the upcoming Smash World Tour Championships — Especially for the players. Please keep an eye out in the coming days for help with travel arrangements. Given the timeline that we were forced into, we had to publish this statement before we could iron out all of the details. All attendees will be issued full refunds.
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The move blindsided the SWT team who had believed, after years of friction, they were starting to make some progress with Nintendo:
In November 2021, after the Panda Cup was first announced, Nintendo contacted us to jump on a call with a few folks on their team, including a representative from their legal team. We truly thought we might be getting shut down given the fact that they now had a licensed competing circuit and partner in Panda.
Once we joined the call, we were very surprised to hear just the opposite.
Nintendo reached out to us to let us know that they had been watching us build over the years, and wanted to see if we were interested in working with them and pursuing a license as well. They made it clear that Panda’s partnership was not exclusive, and they said it had “not gone unnoticed” that we had not infringed on their IP regarding game modifications and had represented Nintendo’s values well. They made it clear that game modifications were their primary concern in regards to “coming down on events”, which also made sense to us given their enforcement over the past few years in that regard.
That lengthy conversation changed our perspective on Nintendo at a macro level; it was incredibly refreshing to talk to multiple senior team members and clear the air on a lot of miscommunications and misgivings in the years prior. We explained why so many in the community were hesitant to reach out to Nintendo to work together, and we truly believed Nintendo was taking a hard look at their relationship with the community, and ways to get involved in a positive manner.
Guess not! In addition to Nintendo now stipulating that tournaments could only run with an official license—something SWT had not been successful applying for—the team also allege that Panda went around undermining them to the organisers of individual events (the World Tour would have been an umbrella linking these together), and that while Nintendo continued saying nice things to their faces, Panda had told these grassroost organisers that the Smash World Tour was definitely getting shut down, which made them reluctant to come onboard.
You can read the full announcement here, which goes into a lot more detail, and closes with an appeal “that Nintendo reconsiders how it is currently proceeding with their relationship with the Smash community, as well as its partners”.
Nintendo said its Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet games for the Nintendo Switch hit an all-times sales record for the company. Pokémon is one of Nintendo’s longest-running and most popular franchises.
Nintendo on Thursday said it latest Pokémon games have set a sales record at the Japanese gaming giant as it continues to pump out blockbusters ahead of the crucial holiday season.
The Kyoto, Japan-headquartered company said sales of the Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet games for the Nintendo Switch surpassed 10 million units in the first three days since their global launch on Nov. 18.
That is the highest level of sales for a game’s debut in Nintendo’s history.
Nintendo’s success with Pokémon comes two months after Splatoon 3 hit a domestic sales record in Japan, in signs the gaming giant is hitting the mark with players ahead of the holidays.
Pokémon is one of Nintendo’s most recognizable and longest-running franchises. Nintendo breathed new life into the series by releasing Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield three years ago and Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl last year.
Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet are different as they are open-world games, allowing players to explore the game environment without completing missions in a linear way.
The video games industry saw a boom during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 as people were stuck at home during lockdowns. But as economies have reopened, the industry has started to normalize, which has weighed on video game giants including Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.
“With the new Pokémon, Nintendo achieved a rare feat among all video game companies: scoring two blockbusters in a difficult 2022 for the industry,” Serkan Toto, CEO of Tokyo-based consultancy Kantan Games, told CNBC.
“Sure, Pokémon is almost always a safe bet, but the new title has exceeded expectations, just like Splatoon 3 did earlier this year.”
Investors are backing Nintendo thanks to its recent blockbusters. The company’s shares are up more than 11% this year, outperforming Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 index. In September, Nintendo carried out a 10-for-1 stock split which has also boosted sentiment.
Nintendo also has a strong pipeline of games. Toto expects The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom slated for release in May to be the company’s next major hit.
But Nintendo is not the only gaming giant entering the holiday season in a strong fashion.
Sony said Wednesday that the God of War Ragnarok title for its PlayStation console sold 5.1 million copies in its first week making it the fastest-selling debut of any first-party game for the company. First-party games are those made by a gaming studio owned by Sony.
Sony shares closed more than 2% higher in Japan on Thursday.
Nintendo carried out a 10-for-1 stock split which reduces the price of an individual share. The 133 year old Japanese gaming giant hopes the move will make it more affordable for a wider pool of investors to buy the company’s shares.
Zhang Peng | LightRocket | Getty Images
Nintendo carried out its previously announced 10-for-1 stock split on Thursday aimed at reducing the price of one individual share to attract new investors to the more than century old Japanese gaming giant.
Prices for Nintendo’s stock reflected the split on the Japanese Stock Exchange website. Nintendo shares closed at 6,043 Japanese yen ($41.76) on Thursday, after closing at 59,700 on Wednesday.
Each share of common Nintendo stock has been split into 10 shares, hence the reduction in price per share.
The move is designed to appeal to a wider pool of investors. In Japan, typically investors must buy a block of 100 shares in one company. At Nintendo’s old share price, that would cost a minimum of 5.97 million Japanese yen, or just over $41,200. With the split, 100 shares would cost 604,300 Japanese yen or just over $4,170 at Thursday’s closing price, potentially making it more affordable for individuals to invest in Nintendo.
“That minimum investment of around 6 million yen is enough to put a student through an entire four-year study program at a Japanese university,” Serkan Toto, CEO of Tokyo-based games consultancy Kantan Games, told CNBC.
“It was really about time for Nintendo as a consumer-facing company with such a strong brand recognition to reduce the share price.”
“Now, Nintendo is more affordable especially for younger people, a type of investor that has been growing in Japan in recent years,” he added.
The split comes at a testing time for Nintendo, a 133-year-old company, amid broader challenges in the video game industry. In the second quarter of the year, Nintendo’s operating profit fell 15% while sales of its flagship Switch games console also declined. The Japanese gaming giant is facing supply chain challenges which is hampering its ability to meet demand for the Switch.
However, Nintendo games are still appealing to a wide range of consumers. The company said this month that sales of Splatoon 3 in Japan surpassed 3.45 million units — a domestic record for any Nintendo Switch software within the first three days of sales. Splatoon 3 was launched on Sept. 9.
Nintendo is also gearing up to release popular titles in the coming months including a new game in the Pokemon franchise.
