Monster Hunter Switch drives Capcom's sales up to $295m

Capcom has released its results for the first half of the fiscal year and it shows growth across the board.

Net sales for the six months ended September 30th are up 17.6% year-on-year to ¥33.7bn ($295m). Operating income rose 191.5% to ¥5bn ($43.79m).

The Digital Contents business, which encompasses video games and mobile titles, was the biggest revenue driver. Sales highlights included a "stalwart performance" by Monster Hunter XX for Switch, with the 3DS version also contributing to the quarter's solid growth.

Previously, Monster Hunter XX appeared to have a disappointing launch - which sparked further worries given Capcom has hinted its support for Switch will depend mostly on how well this game performs. However, the publisher seems pleased with Monster Hunter's sales thus far, and also describes its other Switch release - Ultra Street Fighter II - as a "smash hit."

Resident Evil 7 was cited as another sales highlight having now shipped more than 4m units - although this is still behind its original sales target.

The launch of Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite was also identified a major success. The game shipped 900,000 units around its launch on September 19th, although Capcom has not disclosed how many of these units sold.

Overall, the digital contents division reported net sales of ¥20.13bn ($176.3m), up 23% year-on-year from ¥16.37bn ($143.3m). By contract, Capcom's arcade operations achieved sales of ¥5.17bn ($45.2bn), up 7.7% from ¥4.81bn ($42.1m), while its amusement equipments business reported sales of ¥7.33bn ($642m), up 12.3% year-on-year from ¥6.53bn ($572.9m).

Unit sales for digital contents came in at 3.55m packaged games, an improvement on the 2.7m sold in the same period the previous year.

Full game downloads also increased, reported as 4.85m for the six months, up from 3.8m during the same period last year. Capcom expects digital downloads to account for over a third of all sales by the end of the financial year - 33.6% to be exact, up from 31.5% last year.

Forecast sales expect 23m units shifted by the end of the financial year on March 31st, including 10.5m packaged games and 12.5m downloads.

Monster Hunter: World, which releases on January 26th, is expected to be a major sales driver for the second half, as is Resident Evil 7 Gold Edition and continued sales for Marvel vs Capcom.

Capcom's forecasts for the full financial year remain unchanged, expecting net sales of ¥93bn ($814.5m) - up on the ¥87.17bn ($763.5m) achieved last year - and operating income of ¥14.5bn ($127m) - up from ¥13.65bn ($119.5m).