Nintendo quarterly sales update (To 31st March 2021) Switch 84.59m

[Bofferbrauer2]

holzi said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Another thing I find very interesting is this:

Looks like the Nintendo gamers also increasingly buy digital. And I strongly doubt the pandemic is the only reason for this, though it certainly supported this trend.

These numbers make it look that digital has a higher percentage of digital sales than there really are. 

1. These digital sales don't just include digital version of games with a physical version, but also digital only games, DLC and Switch online.
2. These are not unit sales, but revenue. This means that the 42,8% don't mean that physical games sell 42,8% via the Eshop and codes, but the total revenue of Digital Versions + Digital only games + DLC + Switch Online makes up 42,8% of the revenue of all gaming and services income.

With the help of the right table we can at least exclude Digital only game + DLC + Switch online revenue. We know that physical games made up 57,2% of revenue. Of the digital revenue (42,8%) 59,3% did come from games that are also sold physically which means 25,3% of revenue was from digital versions of physical games. The digital share for physical games therefore is 25,3% / (57,2% + 25,3%) = 30,7%.

And this is based on revenue. Nintendo likely makes significantly more revenue on a digital sale than on a physical sale. I don't know exact numbers, but I think it is reasonable to assume that in terms of unit sales digital is still under or around 25% of total sales.

The amount being based on unit sales or revenue is insignificant and more importantly totally beside the point (I wasn't even looking at those numbers) when you have the percentages of the total sales to compare, and here there's a 8.8 percentage points increase YoY, from 34% of the revenue coming from digital sales in FY20 going up to 42.8% in FY21. And while a part of that increase is certainly due to Covid, I don't think it will drop below 40% anymore even after the pandemic is over.