It's been a rough year for Nintendo, the roughest year (profit-wise) since the NES launched, in fact. Still, while the prevailing story is that Nintendo is being left behind by phone gaming and the big bad high-end consoles, some brand new sales numbers beg to differ. Nintendo's new flagship titles, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, and Super Mario 3D Land, have both set franchise records for early sales, with 3D Land's 500,000 sales in two weeks making it the "fastest selling portable Mario game," and Zelda's 535,000 in first week sales giving it the title of "fastest-selling Zelda game ever." 

Those numbers are small in comparison to Call of Duty (Modern Warfare 3 sold 6.5 million copies in its first 24 hours), but the last Zelda game for the Wii went on to sell 6 million copies, so Nintendo isn't entirely out of that league. More importantly, the new 3DS bundles have led to tripled 3DS sales, and that much-maligned system has hit the DS's 1 year numbers in 8 month's time. Clearly Nintendo isn't having any trouble outpacing its past performance, but it's really up against an entirely different "problem": a rapidly expanding gaming market. We'll see if a rising tide lifts all boats, or if the Wii U can at least capture a sliver of that big bucks FPS market, but at least when it comes to its solid gold franchises, Nintendo isn't going anywhere.