5.7m Amiibos have been shipped, with Link the most popular

Nintendo has now shipped 5.7m of its Amiibo toys worldwide since their release last year.

63 per cent of them have ended up in the US and Canada with just 23 per cent making their way to Europe. 11 per cent went to Japan and three per cent to Australia.

Link has proved the most popular character in the three key regions of Europe, North America and Japan, although Mario emerged triumphant Down Under.

Sell through numbers show harder to find figures such as Captain Falcon, Marth, Little Mac and Ike are unsurprisingly the quickest to sell in all regions.

The company has also reiterated plans to release an NFC adapter for older 3DS consoles. The New 3DS has NFC built in.

What the company couldn’t promise, however, were continued supplies of hard to find Amiibo figures.

It is difficult for us to promise to continuously ship all of the Amiibo figures,” boss Satoru Iwata said. We will, however, consider additional production in cases such as when an Amiibo figure sells out shortly after launch, an Amiibo is indispensable to play a certain game, and when we receive a lot of requests for an Amiibo figure from consumers and retailers.”

There’s also some new Amiibo functionality on the way, too.

We are also planning a free-download app for Wii U in which you can enjoy NES and Super NES games with your amiibo in the first half of this year,” the exec added. With this app, once you tap your Amiibo on the NFC area of the GamePad, you will be able to play highlighted scenes of one certain title for NES or Super NES.

You cannot play the entire game due to a time limit, but another tap of the Amiibo will enable you to try another highlighted scene in the game. We hope that when you tap your Amiibo, the quickly changing game scenes will pleasantly surprise you and make you feel as though you have just exchanged a game cartridge.”