Nintendo lowers full-year forecast as H1 sales fall 34% to $3.4bn

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

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

Here's what you need to know:

The numbers

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

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

The highlights

The first half of Nintendo's fiscal year suffered tough comparisons with the same period in 2023, when the company not only launched the best-selling Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom but also the box office smash that was The Super Mario Bros Movie.

While the company expected some level of decline given its lighter release slate, Nintendo did state in its results that hardware and software sales were both "below our initial expectations."

Nintendo has now modified its full-year forecasts to reflect this. The company previously expected net sales to reach ¥1.35 trillion ($8.9 billion), but now estimates ¥1.28 trillion ($8.4 billion) – down 5% on the initial forecast, and down 23% compared to the previous financial year.

The forecast for operating profit has been lowered 10% from ¥400 billion ($2.6 billion) to ¥360 billion ($2.4 billion), which will be down 32% year-on-year. Ordinary profit remains unchanged at ¥420 billion ($2.8 billion), but this will be down 38% compared to last year.

The declines can all be attributed to the ageing Switch, which is now halfway through its eighth year on shelves – longer than any past Nintendo platform. In May, alongside its full-year financial results, Nintendo announced that it would unveil the Switch's successor before April 2025.

Looking at the past six months, September's The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom was the software sales highlight at 2.58 million copies. It was the biggest selling first-party game in H1 period – despite only being on sale for five days before the results were tallied.

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

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe continued to deliver, shifting another 2.31 million copies and bringing its lifetime sales to over 64 million – still the biggest-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 Switch saw slight increases year-on-year in terms of units sold, but this was offset by the OLED selling around 20 million fewer units than it did in the same period last year.

That said, OLED was the biggest seller in H1 at 2.5 million units – more than the standard and Lite combined. The high-end model has sold 27 million units in its lifetime, compared to 25 million for the Lite and 95 million for the launch model.

Lifetime sales for Switch hardware have now passed 146 million units, slowly closing in on the Nintendo DS' 154 million – still the platform holder's all-time record. Software sales stand at 1.3 billion, more than any Nintendo platform in history.

Drilling down into the revenue, Nintendo reported a 27% year-on-year decline in digital spending, which came in at ¥159.9 billion ($1.1 billion). This was attributed to a decrease in sales for download versions of retail games.

Meanwhile, mobile and IP-related revenues dropped 43% year-on-year to ¥31.2 billion ($205 million) – again, this was due to the tough comparison with the launch of Mario movie the year before.