The game, released July 6, was evolved from an earlier Niantic Labs AR app game called Ingress, which Hanke said has also gained in popularity after the release of Pokemon Go.
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Pokemon Go has helped Nintendo’s shares soar as much as 121 per cent, adding up to $30.7 billion to the firm’s market value, since its initial release on July 6 in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.
The price of shares in Japanese gaming giant Nintendo has slumped due to a number of factors related to smartphone game Pokemon Go.
However the company issued a press release on Friday in Japan after the market had closed describing the financial benefits that the Kyoto-based company would gain from Pokemon Go as “limited”.
Nintendo posted an operating loss of 5.1 billion yen ($49 million) for the April-June quarter, versus a profit of 1.15 billion yen in the same period a year earlier, blaming a stronger yen that eats into the value of income earned overseas. They are hugely important parts of the economy and can make or break companies, but at the end of the day, they are ultimately a measure of a company’s perceived value, not necessarily its actual value. They’ll be okay and are still making money. Niantic, which spun out of Google past year, partnered with Nintendo to create the game.
All told, roughly 13 percent of Pokemon Go sales should flow to Nintendo, according to an estimate by David Gibson, analyst at Macquarie Securities in Tokyo.
“Nintendo is well-placed to boost its earnings with its other characters, such as Super Mario and Zelda and their potential is unknown”, he said.
Nintendo has made it clear that while Pokemon Go has been an unprecedented success, the company neither developed nor published the game.
A man plays Pokemon Go on his smartphone outside of Nintendo’s flagship NYC store.
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“If I could summon a Pokemon for you, I would”, said Niantic CEO John Hanke when an audience member asked if there were any chance players would receive covetable rare Pokemon for attending the event. If the game generates about 396 billion yen annually, that would add about 47 billion yen to Nintendo’s bottom line, he said.
