The Pokémon Company worked with Niantic to release Pokémon GO this summer, and it was a huge hit. Nintendo talked about the impact of the immensely popular mobile game and how it helped 3DS sales in their semi-annual financial results briefing for fiscal year ending March 2017.
Over the summer, the smart device application Pokémon GO became a major hit and a social phenomenon.
This has sparked increased interest in Pokémon related software. Previous entries in the Pokémon series playable on the Nintendo 3DS system were Pokémon X and Pokémon Y in 2013 and Pokémon Omega Ruby and Pokémon Alpha Sapphire in 2014. We also released the original games in this series, Pokémon Red, Pokémon Green, Pokémon Blue and Pokémon Pikachu, as downloadable Virtual Console titles in February this year. These Pokémon series titles have seen an increase in sales despite having been on the market for some time already.
Note: Pokémon Green was released outside of Japan as Pokémon Blue.
This graph shows the month-on-month sales of titles in the Pokémon series in Japan, the U.S. and Europe, as mentioned earlier in the presentation. As you can see, the release of Pokémon GO in July led to a major upsurge in sales, particularly for the U.S. and European markets. We can clearly see that the release of Pokémon GO has raised interest in Pokémon and contributed to a resurgence of sales for previously-released Pokémon titles.
Similarly, this graph shows the month-on-month sales for Nintendo 3DS family systems. You can see that there is a peak in July for hardware as well, following the release of Pokémon GO.
We launched the Pokémon GO Plus accessory on September 16th to provide a more comfortable play experience for Pokémon GO. Demand far exceeded our expectations and production has not caught up, leading to product shortages. We apologize to the consumers and distributors affected by this. We are planning to expand production as needed, and will continue to produce and ship additional units.
