amiibo Is Really Popular In North America, Nintendo Stats Say

Late last night (but in the morning over in Japan), Nintendo held their quarterly financial results briefing for stockholders, releasing their slides to the public on their website later on. There was a lot of interesting stats being relayed to investors, including the fact that 63% of all worldwide amiibo shipments have gone to retailers in US and Canada. 23% have gone to Europe, 11% of shipments have gone to Japan and 3% have made it over to Australia. Those are the regional breakdowns, even though amiibo figures are sold in countries that lie outside those boundaries.

Furthermore, Nintendo has released information regarding both the retailer sales rankings for certain amiibo figures across the world. As you can probably guess, the staple Nintendo IP figures sell well around the world, with Link taking the top spot in all regions except for Australia (Mario). Mario, Pikachu and Kirby also make up various spots in the Top 5 around the world (except for Europe, where his 9th spot is fairly intriguing).

More importantly, the sell-through to consumers amiibo power rankings suggest the worldwide interest in the figures when taking actual purchases into account.

What I find surprising is Japan’s reaction to the Little Mac amiibo, countering what many forum-goers in Japan were experiencing when he was first announced for Super Smash Bros. Furthermore, I’m quite saddened to see that Samus is not selling so well, making a Top 10 appearance only with 10th in Japan and 9th in US+Canada. Hopefully, Nintendo doesn’t take that sales data as an indicator for the franchise’s interest from gaming fans, as I’m sure many would like to see their first quality Metroid title since Metroid Prime 3 in 2007.

Finally, ending the amiibo segment comes the news that Nintendo is planning to implement free download apps for Wii U usage in future amiibo releases. Coming in the first half of 2015, they will include NES and SNES games with time-limited play. Using certain other amiibo figures will allow you to jump to other parts of the game, effectively working to demo their Virtual Console classics. It’s a great way to extend the value and shelf life of the figurines, outside of just sitting on a shelf itself. If only Nintendo would make more of the much-requested rare figures!

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