Looks Like The iPhone Is Claiming Another Victim: Nintendo Posts Loss Of $460 Million

 According to various reports, Nintendo has lost $458 million last year, a first for the company. For most in the industry, it was pretty obvious that Nintendo was directly competing with the iPhone and iPad, but to some, it may come as a bit of a surprise that Nintendo seems to be losing the mobile gaming war to Apple.

From Reuters:

They have been beaten by smartphones and tablets, in particular, for consumers spending and, more importantly, time,” David Gibson, an analyst for Macquarie in Tokyo said before the results announcement … A year ago Nintendo expected to sell 13 million Wii consoles and ended up selling 9.8 million. It had a target for 16 million for its new 3DS handhelds but ended up offloading only 13.5 million last business year. It managed to shift only half the 11 million DS machines it wanted to sell.

Last August there were reports circulating that Nintendo investors were pushing the company to take some of their key game franchises to iOS devices. It’s clear that the demand for these titles on iOS would be strong. Fake games and clones that rely heavily on Nintendo’s famous titles sell very well on the App Store.

Nintendo is pretty adamant about only developing titles for their own platforms, but another year or two of these kinds of losses and Nintendo may start singing an entirely different tune. As it stands, Nintendo is losing out to the iPhones in our pockets, and our iPads on our nightstands. Unless the company is planning on turning the 3DS into a smartphone, things look pretty bleak for the company.

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld and TechHive.