Nintendo lowers full-year forecast as first-half sales fall 34% to $3.4 billion

Nintendo has released its financial results for the six months ended September 30, showing further declines in hardware and software sales as the wait for the Switch’s successor continues.

During the first half of its fiscal year, the platform holder reported a 34% decline in net sales, a 31% drop in hardware, and a 27.6% drop in software. As a result, Nintendo has lowered its expectations for the full year.

Here’s what you need to know:

the numbers

Net sales: 523.3 billion yen ($3.4 billion, down 34% year-on-year)
Operating profit: 121.5 billion yen ($798.3 million, down 57%)
Ordinary benefit: 147.1 billion yen ($966.5 million, down 61.3%)

Hardware sales: 4.72 million (31% less)
Software sales: 70.28 million (-27.6%)

The highlights

The first half of Nintendo’s fiscal year suffered harsh comparisons to the same period in 2023, when the company not only released the best-selling Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom but also the blockbuster that was The Super Mario Bros Movie.

While the company expected some level of decline due to its lighter release slate, Nintendo stated in its results that hardware and software sales were “below our initial expectations.”

Nintendo has now revised its full-year forecasts to reflect this. The company previously expected net sales to reach 1.35 trillion yen ($8.9 billion), but now estimates 1.28 trillion yen ($8.4 billion), down 5% from the initial forecast and a 23% less than the previous financial year.

The operating profit forecast has been reduced by 10%, from 400 billion yen ($2.6 billion) to 360 billion yen ($2.4 billion), a reduction of 32% year-on-year. Ordinary profit remains unchanged at 420 billion yen ($2.8 billion), but will be 38% lower than last year.

All of the drops can be attributed to the aging of the Switch, which is now halfway through its eighth year on shelves, longer than any previous Nintendo platform. In May, along with its full-year financial results, Nintendo announced that it would unveil the successor to the Switch before April 2025.

Looking back over the past six months, September’s The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom was the peak in software sales with 2.58 million copies. It was the best-selling first-party game in the first half, even though it was only on sale for five days before the results were tallied.

The next best-selling games were remakes of previous titles, with Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door selling 1.94 million copies and Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD selling 1.57 million.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe continued to deliver, selling another 2.31 million copies and bringing its total sales to over 64 million, still the best-selling Switch game of all time. In total, nine Switch games sold more than one million units during the six-month period, including three third-party titles.

In hardware, both the standard and Lite models of the Switch saw slight year-over-year increases in terms of units sold, but this was offset by the OLED selling around 20 million fewer units than the same period last year.

That said, OLED was the biggest seller in the first half with 2.5 million units, more than the standard and Lite combined. The high-end model has sold 27 million units throughout its life, compared to 25 million for the Lite and 95 million for the launch model.

Lifetime sales of Switch hardware have surpassed 146 million units, slowly approaching the Nintendo DS’s 154 million, which remains the platform owner’s all-time record. Software sales total 1.3 billion, more than any Nintendo platform in history.

Digging deeper into revenue, Nintendo reported a 27% year-over-year decline in digital spending, which amounted to 159.9 billion yen ($1.1 billion). This was attributed to a decline in sales of downloadable versions of retail games.

Meanwhile, mobile and IP-related revenue fell 43% year-on-year to 31.2 billion yen ($205 million); again, this was due to the harsh comparison to the Mario movie release the previous year.