Nintendo Surges with Nearly 140 Million Switch Consoles

Nintendo reported that it earned a net profit of $919 million on revenues of $4 billion in the quarter ending December 31. Those figures represent growth of 17.9 percent and 7.7 percent, respectively, and Nintendo raised its forecast for Switch hardware and software sales in the current quarter thanks to the better-than-expected resiliency of this 7-year-old video game platform.

“We want to maintain the momentum of the Switch business,” Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa said during a post-earning conference call.

The firm has done just that, despite rumors of a coming generational replacement: Nintendo has sold 13.74 million Switch consoles three quarters into its fiscal year, bringing the lifetime total for the platform to 139.36 million units. “Sell-through [of the console] has remained steady,” Nintendo noted of the quarter. “And there are more annual playing users than ever before,” it added, referencing the growth of its player base, which hit a record 122 million people this past year, up from 114 million the previous year.

While Switch sales fell 7.8 percent year-over-year (YOY) so far in the fiscal year, understandable given its age, the results were better than expected, and Nintendo raised its forecast for full fiscal year sales. It now expects to sell 15.5 million Switch consoles this fiscal year, up from 15 million, and 190 million software titles, up from 185 million units. Regardless, the Switch is now Nintendo’s and the industry’s second-best-selling video game device of all time, behind only the Nintendo DS and Sony PlayStation 2, both of which sold about 154/155 million units in their lifetimes.

Nintendo also cited the popularity of several software titles, including The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which has sold 20.28 million units, Super Mario Bros. Wonder (11.96 million units), and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (6.79 million units). 17 Nintendo titles and 7 third-party titles sold over one million units so far in this fiscal year, the company says. And 46 percent of all software sold this year has been digital, not physical.