I can understand that XCX is niche however that's a whole lot of excuses for the other games. And with Nintendo marketing a lot of its games to kids during the holiday period, release dates don't matter as much as for core games. In any case, Nintendo released a lot of games last year so it's normal for them to make a profit.

Good. I like Nintendo better when they're struggling.

But I guess most of the profits came from those 9.9M Amiibo sales. Make them for cheap in China and sell them for $20.

You think most profits came from amiibo? Cmon now. First of all they are $13 msrp. Second they aren't that cheap. 

Edit: let's say nintendo makes $8 for each amiibo (hint it's way less), that would come out to a profit of $80mil of the entire year, so easily no! 

Well splatoon sold 4m. 

4m x 60$ (it's 65 on amazon)  is 250$. Do you think the game cost over $50m to make.  It looks super cheap compared to modern day AAA. So why wouldn't roughly 200m of their profit be from splatoon? 

I think the markup is more than $8 on those figurines. And that would be in line with their philosophy - make stuff for cheap and sell them at a high price by providing a heavy marketing push. I wonder whether they'll stick to the same stuff again with the NX or if their devs will get more freedom.

Nothing unusual here, Wii U is still selling terrible and it will be worst selling Nintendo console ever, while 3DS enters in its 5. year on market so fall in sale is normal. Actual profit of $330m for 9 months is great if Nintendo if we consider those fact, also high chances are that we will have at least one new hardware from Nintendo this year, and offcourse first mobile games.

Actually they sold around 20m for 9 months, let say they have only $6 profit from every amiibo, that around $120m profit for 9 months, that's not bad at all from just a toy.

Actually Splatoon in Europe and Japan is around $40 and in US is $60, so lets count only $40 for game, 4m x $40 is $160m. For instance Witcher 3 development with whole marketing cost around $80m, Splatoon had strong marketing, but even with strong marketing I dont think it costed more than $50m, add to that around $10m shiping and sales costs, that means Nintendo made at least $100m (but relaisticly around 120m becuse game cost $60 in US), profit from Splatoon alone till 31. December.

LipeJJ said: Still profiting, right? That's something. Anyway, we have to keep in mind that they are developing the NX, so they must have spent a good amount of $$$ on R&D last year. They also seem to be developing QoL, whatever it is.

People don't realize that they definitely had spent good amount of money for R&D for NX, we will know those costs at end of FY year.

The game budget  is definitely alot less than your average game, but the mistake you made here is the profits. It's nowhere near that. Even if first party, I don't think they  make even 50% on each copy sold.

Another factor is 2 things.  1.europe has about 1mil in sales, most likely more. It'll profit alot less than normal (being about 40 msrp). (so about  a third drop in profits?) 

2. I would say about 400k-500k WW were bundle sales (thanks to euro+noa) which means the game itself won't be sold as much as a profit

The game I think overall budget and marketing was around 12mil dollars.