The Switch has hit a significant overall milestone, reaching 89.04 million units shipped worldwide, even as Nintendo’s overall sales have finally hit a post-quarantine slump.
Nintendo, with U.S. headquarters in Redmond, Wash., released its quarterly earnings report on Thursday morning, which always has a lot to go over. Compared to Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo is unusually transparent about its precise sales numbers.
In April through June of this year, Nintendo sold 4.45 million Switches and 45.29 million pieces of software. April’s New Pokémon Snap, a long-awaited sequel to the 1999 Pokémon photo safari, sold 2.07 million units, while May’s remake RPG Miitopia comfortably broke a million. Mario Golf: Super Rush, despite middling reviews, managed to move 1.34 million units after its release in June.
Surprisingly, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is still the best-selling game on the Switch, with another 1.69 million units sold in the quarter for a total of 37.08 million, while Animal Crossing: New Horizons “only” sold another 1.26 million for a total of 33.89 million. I had expected that New Horizons would’ve closed the gap by now, but I suppose this is what I get for betting against Mario.
Even so, these numbers mark a significant slowdown for Nintendo’s overall sales, with hardware taking a 21.7% hit from this time last year and software down by 10.2%. Digital sales took a particular downturn, moving 24.9% less units than in the same quarter in 2020.
This isn’t a warning sign yet, however. Nintendo’s profits did take a hit, but as the report itself notes, the same quarter in 2020 featured the debut of New Horizons, which was a massive success out of the gate and was a big system seller for the Switch.
April through June of last year also featured the start of international social distancing measures, which in turn powered a boost in sales for the entire video game industry. Nintendo had less going on this past spring, and as such, this quarter was always going to come off weaker for the comparison.
It’s interesting here to note how the mainstream business press is covering this, as opposed to the game enthusiast sites. Investors and analysts have been keeping a close eye on the video game industry in the last year and a half, basically waiting to see when (or if) the pandemic’s effect on sales was going to die down. Sony and Microsoft have both posted significant boosts in hardware sales recently, as their next-generation consoles sell almost as quickly as they can be made, which makes Nintendo look worse for the comparison.
For the games press, however, this can be seen as essentially a return to business as usual for Nintendo. The Switch tends to go in cycles, where consumer interest is driven by Nintendo’s highly anticipated first-party games. Since Nintendo hasn’t had a big original release in a while (arguably not since New Horizons, in fact), it’s natural that it’d be on a down beat at the moment, but this will all reverse instantly once there’s a release date for something like Breath of the Wild 2.
Even with the slower sales on the Switch, the 89 million milestone is enough to make it the 7th best-selling video game console of all time, overtaking Microsoft’s Xbox 360 (somewhere over 84 million) and Sony’s PlayStation 3 (87.4 million). Nintendo expects that the Switch will break the 100 million units moved mark around March of 2022, at which point it will have sold more systems, and done so faster, than the record-setting Wii.
(It’s also worth noting here that unlike Sony or Microsoft, Nintendo is estimated to actually make money on per-unit hardware sales. There’s a solid 20-year trend where news about Nintendo has never been as bad as analysts will try to say it is, and today’s financial report is no particular exception.
Nintendo has made no changes to its financial forecast for the rest of the year, with October’s release of the OLED Switch promising to fuel a boost in hardware sales.
Its first-party games for this year’s holiday season include WarioWare: Get It Together! in September; Metroid Dread and the online-powered Mario Party Superstars in October; and two big Pokémon remakes, Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, in November.
This is a relatively weak slate, as the last year’s COVID work-from-home measures have continued to slow down Nintendo’s internal production cycle. Of its big first-party releases, three of the five — Superstars is a compilation of minigames and boards from across the Mario Party series — are effectively rereleases, as is July’s HD remaster of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Like a lot of developers right now, Nintendo has been forced to improvise in order to fill out its release calendar.
This holiday season also puts Nintendo in the strange position of relying on a Metroid game as a holiday tentpole; despite its position as one of Nintendo’s core franchises, the Metroid series has traditionally been treated like the red-headed stepchild of the line.
