Nintendo market value drops $1 billion after E3 showing
Animal Crossing delay contributes to investor unease
Nintendo shares fell 3.5% on Wednesday as investors reacted negatively to the company’s E3 announcements, including a delay to Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
It was the company’s biggest one-day decline since April and knocked $1 billion off Nintendo’s market value, according to the Financial Times.
However, the FT also noted that Nintendo’s stock is “perennially volatile” and pointed out that at close on Wednesday it was up nearly 30% year to date.
The decline continued on Thursday as shares in Nintendo fell 1.55%.
During a Nintendo Direct broadcast on Tuesday, the platform holder delayed Animal Crossing: New Horizons from its previously announced 2019 launch window to March 20, 2020.
The last mainline entry in the series, 2012’s Animal Crossing: New Leaf for Nintendo 3DS, sold over 12.2 million copies.
While Animal Crossing’s delay will hit Nintendo’s sales for the current fiscal year, the company still has several high-profile Switch releases scheduled to arrive in 2019, including November’s Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield and Luigi’s Mansion 3.
On Tuesday Nintendo also announced a direct sequel to Switch launch title The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time and one of the console’s best-performing releases, having sold some 12.8 million copies as of March 2019. A launch window for the game wasn’t confirmed.
The FT says Nintendo investors may also be concerned by a lack of confirmation of new Switch hardware, with a widely tipped cheaper model having helped lift the Kyoto-based company’s share price this year.
On Wednesday the Wall Street Journal claimed two new Switch models, including a more portable version of the console targeted at a younger audience, had entered production.
