Nintendo Cuts Switch Forecast as Revenues Fall Again

In what is now a familiar story, Nintendo earnings fell over the holiday quarter, forcing the firm to cut its Switch sales forecast again.

Nintendo’s financial report covers the nine-month period from April through December 2024, so I had to do a bit of math. From what I can see, Nintendo delivered a net income of roughly $454 million on revenues of $1.12 billion in the quarter ending December 31, 2024.

(For the nine-month period, Nintendo reported a net income of ¥237,189,000 (USD$1.53 billion) on revenues of ¥956,218,000 (USD$6.2 billion). Those figures represent declines of 42 percent and 31 percent, year-over-year (YOY), respectively.)

Nintendo sold 13.74 million Switch consoles in the nine-month period ending in December, a decline of 30.6 percent YOY. Using math–sorry–that means it told about 6.9 million Switch consoles in the quarter.

As a result, Nintendo once again cut its forecast for Switch sales for its current fiscal year, which ends March 31. In the previous quarter, Nintendo said it expected to sell 12.5 million Switch consoles in the year, a decline of 1 million units from the previous prediction. Now, it expects to sell 11 million units, a further decline of 1.5 million units.

To date, Nintendo has sold 151 million Switch consoles, still short of the 154 million units it sold of the Nintendo DS. Given the revised forecast, Nintendo expects to sell about 1.5 million Switch consoles in the current quarter, which means the Switch will now fall short of the DS this fiscal year, landing somewhere around 152.3 million units. But Switch sales will still surpass those of the DS sometime this calendar year, of course.

As for software, Nintendo and third party game publishers now have a collective 19 games that have sold over one million units on Switch, and software sales in that same nine-month period hit 124 million units, a decline of 24.4 percent YOY. “Even so,” Nintendo noted, “sales remained steady for a platform in its eighth year.” Digital sales now account for 51 percent of all Nintendo Switch software, up from 48.1 percent in the same nine-month period one year earlier.

Nintendo reiterated that the Switch 2 will launch in 2025, with a launch at Nintendo Direct on April 2 and Nintendo Switch 2 Experience events in various cities worldwide starting in April.