It’s been a real roller-coaster for Nintendo these past few weeks. The huge success of Pokemon GO led to a massive surge in the price of Nintendo’s stock – but that’s all over now.
Why? Because investors finally worked out that Nintendo had nothing to do with Pokemon GO. As a result, the company’s stock took a dive.
Nintendo’s stock dropped 5,000 yen to 23,220, which is around 18 percent (the maximum allowed in a day). That’s the biggest drop for Nintendo since 1990- but the price of their stock is still up from what it was before Pokemon GO launched.
It seems that investors simply assumed Nintendo was closely involved with Pokemon GO, as the franchise is exclusive to Nintendo platforms.
As you probably know, Pokemon GO was actually developed by Niantic and overseen by The Pokemon Company.
As the name may suggest, The Pokemon Company are the owners of the franchise, though Nintendo has a 32 percent stake in it.
While nobody knows the specific nature of the Pokemon GO deal, considering any revenue generated through the iOS or Android app stores sees 30 percent go to Apple and Google – Niantic and The Pokemon Company obviously need to see some of that too.
So unfortunately, Nintendo is probably getting much less from the game than anyone assumed.
At the end of the day, Nintendo is only going to benefit from Pokemon GO – just not quite to the extent everyone imagined.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.