Noticias Recientes

Nintendo Switch drives staggering 500 percent profit jump

Nintendo sold just over 15 million Switch consoles in the last financial year, matching its own raised expectations after a hugely successful launch. The company initially planned to ship 10 million in the year from April 2017, then upped its forecast to 14 million last October, then again to 15 million in January. The total amount sold since its March 3rd, 2017 release is now 17.79 million, outstripping the 13.56 million the Wii U sold over its five years of production.

Overall, Nintendo made 178 billion yen ($1.62 billion) in operating profit for the year, a massive 505-percent increase on the previous 12 months. Revenue increased 116 percent to 1.06 trillion yen ($9.66 billion). Nintendo sold over 10 million copies of Super Mario Odyssey, 9 million copies of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and 6 million copies of Splatoon 2, alongside more than 5 million units of the SNES Classic Edition. The company is also forecasting that it'll sell 20 million Switch consoles between this month and next March. Labo (above), the new line of cardboard peripherals, is expected to expand the audience for the Switch.

Alongside the results, Nintendo announced that its president and CEO Tatsumi Kimishima will be stepping down, to be replaced by board member Shuntaro Furukawa, 46. Kimishima, 68, took over in 2015 after the death of Satoru Iwata, and was widely seen as an interim appointment. Given his age and Nintendo's considerable momentum, Furukawa is likely to stay in his post for far longer.


George R.R. Martin will publish Fire and Blood, the 640-page Game of Thrones history book no one asked for, this fall

George R.R. Martin has announced that he’ll be releasing a new book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series this fall — sort of. No, it’s not the long awaited The Winds of Winter, which promises to finally continue the saga that Martin begin back in 1996 and which fans have been waiting almost seven years to read. Rather, fans will be able to enjoy 640 pages of Fire and Blood, a collection of short stories that tell “the definitive history of the Targaryens in Westeros.”

Fire and Blood is said to be the first of two planned volumes of these historical stories, which Martin has alluded to before in the main series of the books, as well as in his companion history, The World of Ice and Fire. But Fire and Blood, along with its unnamed sequel, promise a more in-depth look at the tale. According to Martin, volume one “covers all the Targaryen kings from Aegon I (the Conquerer) to the regency of Aegon III (the Dragonbane),” while the rest will be coming in volume two somewhere down the line. (Martin promises that he’ll get to it in a “few years,” but take that with a grain of salt.)