That’s what you get when you entrust your company to Green Mario aka John Leguizamo’s finest role aka Luigi for a year: massive operating losses totaling $456 million and broad speculation about the death of its hardware business.
Nintendo‘s just released its financial results for the financial year ending March 31 – a period that overlaps almost entirely with the Year Of Luigi, which ended May 18. The results are not good. They’re not good enough that some people are already arguing that the company should cut its losses and give up on producing hardware, given that the main reason for the loss is the underperforming Wii U, which took a year to sell just 2.7 million units. (By contrast, the PS4 sold roughly 7 million in roughly half the time.)
It’s been a bad day for Nintendo, who’ve copped a lot of justifiable backlash for only allowing heterosexual flirting and marriage in upcoming life simulator Tomodachi Life.
In a statement, Nintendo of America said “The relationship options in the game represent a playful alternate
world rather than a real-life simulation. We hope that all of our fans
will see that ‘Tomodachi Life’ was intended to be a whimsical and quirky
game, and that we were absolutely not trying to provide social
commentary.”
Gay relationships in video gaming aren’t exactly revolutionary: franchises like The Sims, The Elder Scrolls and Mass Effect have included them as an option with very little fanfare for years, so it’s hard to understand the opposition.
A hit in Japan with nearly two million copies sold, Tomodachi Life is one of Nintendo’s biggest hopes for reviving its fortunes. Let’s hope it works out.
