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27 Apr 2016 03:42 AM
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A new news article has been posted!
The Consolidated Results for the Years Ended March 31, 2015 and 2016 was published by Nintendo on April 27th, 2016. The report states that the new Nintendo NX system will be launched in March 2017 globally. Also of note, Pokémon Sun and Moon will not launch globally at the same time with Nintendo specifically stating that the games will launch in the United States during the holiday season while Europe is slated for late 2016. This is a significant release schedule change since the release of X and Y which were the first Pokémon games to launch worldwide on the same day and include multiple different languages. Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire were release a week later in Europe on November 28th, 2014 compared to the rest of the world which launched on November 21st, 2014.

The report also listed some sales figures for Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon. The game has sold 1.22 million copies worldwide as of March 31st, 2016.

Quotes from the report

Fiscal year ended March 31, 2016
"During the fiscal year ended March 31, 2016, for Nintendo 3DS, Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer and Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon were released globally and both became hits, selling 3.04 million and 1.22 million units respectively. There were also multiple hit titles from third-party publishers. However, due to the lack of major titles like Pokémon Omega Ruby/Pokémon Alpha Sapphire and Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS, which energized the entire 3DS business during the prior fiscal year, the worldwide sales of the Nintendo 3DS hardware and software were 6.79 million and 48.52 million units respectively."

Outlook for fiscal year ending March 31, 2017
"For Nintendo 3DS, we will release Pokémon Sun/Pokémon Moon globally in winter of 2016 (holiday 2016 in the U.S. and late 2016 in Europe). These are the latest titles from the Pokémon series, which has sold 200 million units worldwide since the first title from the series released 20 years ago."

Source: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2016/160427e.pdf
27 Apr 2016 05:28 AM
Sunain Administrator
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To clarify this news post, no where does Nintendo or GAME FREAK state like they did with X and Y that Sun and Moon will release globally on the same day. The global same day release schedule already changed with ORAS which had different launch days, Europe being a week behind. Nintendo does state that the games will launch globally in the winter 2016 but that's in an availability sense not a same day release sense. They also didn't need to specifically add the brackets delineating the separate idea that winter 2016 was different to holiday 2016 and late 2016. They could have just left it as coming "globally in winter of 2016" and no one would have thought differently but they made the specific point to mention separately the two regions of the world in the English version of the report. The Japanese version of the report actually doesn't have the "(holiday 2016 in the U.S. and late 2016 in Europe)" and was specifically added to the English version of the report.

Having been born in England and am living in Canada, I do realize that many places in Europe don't call it "the Holiday season" like we do in North America, there is a distinction here though between late 2016 and holiday season 2016. The Holiday season for shopping generally means November 1st to December 24th in North America, after Halloween and until Christmas Eve. In United States and even Canada now, the biggest shopping day of the year is Black Friday. Nintendo and GAME FREAK will surely not want to miss this date for sales. Friday November 25th, 2016 is Black Friday.

The US trailer says "Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon Arrive in Late 2016!": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmzDL1l3Fag which would be the same wording used in the UK trailer "Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon Arrive in Late 2016!" at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdTQ6NXTrE0

Nintendo and the TPCi could have just continued to say like they have been up until this report that the games would be released in late 2016 and available in 9 languages. Late in North America means late in the shopping season, after American Thanksgiving and Black Friday but before Christmas, aka December, and arguably it means the same thing worldwide.

The XYZ anime will probably end the last week of October 2016 in Japan, leading to the inevitable Pokemon Sun and Moon series starting the beginning of November, as current anime season patterns have been going the past few years. As history shows, the anime and games generally launch the same week. They may also change it this time and have the anime launch a few weeks before the games. The XYZ anime with its Zygarde arc didn't really have a corresponding game equivalent this time round.

For piracy reasons, I can't see there being a very big release schedule difference for the Sun and Moon now that the Nintendo 3DS is trivial to hack. Any major release date different in any region of the world would most likely lead to significant sales reductions.

With the Corocoro April 2016 debacle nonsense, it seems as though GAME FREAK is behind schedule. Regardless if I'm right or wrong on this release schedule inconsistency, at least its got people talking about Sun and Moon because surely we have nothing else to discuss about it these days.

Last edited 27 Apr 2016 07:16 AM by Sunain
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09 Jul 2017 04:03 PM
Sunain Administrator
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Just as a follow up to this news article, as eluded to in The Consolidated Results for the Years Ended March 31, 2015 and 2016 published by Nintendo on April 27th, 2016, Pokémon Sun and Moon did not launch globally on the same day. It was released on November 18th, 2016 in North America, Australia, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan and on November 23rd, 2016 in Europe and Russia. The games did not launch globally on the same day as we originally reported in this news article.
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