We know the opening weekend number is 10m. How close did we get to 20?
Nintendo has released their earnings report for the first fiscal quarter of the 2023-24 fiscal year, and thanks to the launch of Tears of the Kingdom and having the top-grossing movie of the year as of now, all of the relevant financial indicators are up.
All monetary figures quoted in yen, with a comparison based on current market rate of US$1 = ¥x provided for clarification only.
Financial Indicators
Revenue: ¥461.341bn (~$3.225bn US), up 50% year over year
Operating income: ¥185.441b (~$1.297b US), up 82.4%
Ordinary income: ¥253.766b (~$1.774b US), up 52.2%
Digital sales: ¥119.6b (~$836.1m US), up 35.9%
Mobile and IP revenue (including the Super Mario Bros. movie): ¥31.8bn (~$222.3m US), up 190.1%
Hardware Shipments
A total of 3.91 Switch systems were shipped in the quarter, bringing the platform’s lifetime total to 129.53m. It would need to ship 24.49m systems to pass the DS and 29.17m to pass the PlayStation 2 as the best selling platform in company history and console gaming history, respectively. The breakdown of systems:
- 2.83m OLED models (note the special edition for Tears of the Kingdom was an OLED) – a record 72.37% share
- 640,000 standard models
- 430k Lite models
New Software
The biggest mover of the quarter was The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (May 12) which after shipping 10m copies in its opening weekend totaled 18.51m for the quarter: this is the largest opening quarter since Pokemon Scarlet and Violet in fiscal Q3 and second largest opening quarter of the Switch’s lifetime.
Other releases for the quarter were the Western-only release of Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp, the surprise digital releases of Pikmin 1 and 2, and the infamous Everybody 1-2 Switch; none of these recorded 1m shipped copies in the quarter. Only 2 games reached 1m shipments in the quarter overall.
Catalogue Sales
The full top 10 can be found here, though some highlights:
- Mario Kart 8 Deluxe shipped another 1.67m units, and remains the best selling game on the platform at 55.46m copies sold
- Breath of the Wild (+840k) has officially entered the 30m club – the fourth Switch game to do so
- Super Mario Odyssey (+680k, 26.44m LTD) has passed Pokemon Sword and Shield to become the fifth best selling game on the platform
- Pokemon Scarlet and Violet added another 560k shipments pending its DLC release, for a new lifetime total of 22.66m copies
- Buoyed by the success of the Mario movie, New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe has re-entered the top 10 (LTD 16.17m) ahead of Ring Fit Adventure
Other Announcements
Although shipments to retail + digital are 18.51m copies for Tears of the Kingdom, 15.7m copies have been sold to consumers in its first 8 weeks (last weeks of May and June).
The new worldwide box office for the Mario movie is US$1.349bn as it moves to home release – the 2nd largest animated film ever pending the performance of the July 21-launched Barbie movie.
The slate of upcoming releases includes announcements made in the June 21 Direct as well as Metroid Prime 4 as TBA: the Princess Peach game is called “Princess Peach will star as the main character in a brand new game (temp.).”
