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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Nintendo quarterly results May 7th 2020 - Switch: 55.77m, (21m for the FY) Animal Crossing: 11.77m

All this info is great. I don't remember Nintendo being so open with individual game sales in the past. Is this new with the Switch or am I just not remembering correctly?



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You kind of have to remember though last Q2 Nintendo released the Switch Lite and shipped a lot of them in that first wave because of tariff fears from the US/China situation at the time. That certainly caused a good sized boost.



theRepublic said:
All this info is great. I don't remember Nintendo being so open with individual game sales in the past. Is this new with the Switch or am I just not remembering correctly?

They started giving data on million-sellers at the end of FY2006 (ended March 2007).

Here's the first report that had this information. It's on page 5. https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2007/070427e.pdf



Soundwave said:
You kind of have to remember though last Q2 Nintendo released the Switch Lite and shipped a lot of them in that first wave because of tariff fears from the US/China situation at the time. That certainly caused a good sized boost.

What’s this post suppose to mean? Most of the NSW is sold out, so the extra units ship is gone. And it is the same with all systems with an extra model on the market. 

sorry I’m confused by what your implying o.O



tbone51 said:
Soundwave said:
You kind of have to remember though last Q2 Nintendo released the Switch Lite and shipped a lot of them in that first wave because of tariff fears from the US/China situation at the time. That certainly caused a good sized boost.

What’s this post suppose to mean? Most of the NSW is sold out, so the extra units ship is gone. And it is the same with all systems with an extra model on the market. 

sorry I’m confused by what your implying o.O

It means that this year's Q2 isn't guaranteed to be the same/similar to last year's Q2, there was a large uptick in sales last Q2 from the Switch Lite launch and lots of people noted the initial shipment was very large to hold retailers over into the fall if need be because Nintendo was worried about tariff penalties kicking in. That could go either way. 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 10 May 2020

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Marth said:
S.Peelman said:

Don't know if anyone already made this comparison, but I was curious about Wii software sales for last fiscal year. As usual, Mario Kart Wii remains impressive, having sold 120k still after all these years. What's also interesting however is that apparently Wii Sports is also still selling;

Net changes in shipment totals of Nintendo's first party Wii top 10;

1 Wii Sports +30k
2 Mario Kart Wii +120k
3 Wii Sports Resort +30k
4 New Super Mario Bros. Wii +40k
5 Wii Play +0
6 Wii Fit +0
7 Wii Fit Plus +0
8 Super Smash Bros. Brawl +20k
9 Super Mario Galaxy +10k
10 Wii Party +10k

Also checked DS, there no game has additional sales (while it does now say "as of 2020") compared to last year. Don't remember if that was also the case last year. For WiiU every game in the top 10 did +10k, except Super Mario 3D World and Mario Party 10, which both did +20k.

Haven't gone though every entry of the top 10 but from what I have seen the totals did not increase last year either. Our GameDB should be up to date on all big Nintendo sales.

Safe to say DS software is completely dead and without a digital storefront it will stay that way.

And no Switch Sports, or Switch Fit and a brand new AAA 2d Mario, Nintendo?



Otter said:
The_Liquid_Laser said:

Sound reasoning attacks an argument and not a person.  That's why it matters what other people said.  I am defeating an argument and not a person.  If a different person gives the same bad argument, then it's still a bad argument.

You are defeating the argument that hardware and software have saturation points? I'm sure you believe in a saturation point even if you disagree with the when that actually arrives.

Otherwise your logic is that a console will not decline as long as established big franchises are released for it and it will continue selling peak levels forever & there is no ceiling on how many users a new pokemon game will attract.

If an early pokemon game sells 16m and a late gen pokemon with double the userbase sells another 16m, you can already start to do the math to understand that maybe a large portion of 16m for the latter release is repeat users and there is not exponential growth.

Ultimately stop focusing on what other people have said in 2018 and just say that you don't think 2020 will be the reach of that saturation point because X, Y, Z.  

I.e you think Nintendo will produce more games for very casual audiences and they will be immediate smashs hits in ways 1,2 Switch and Ring Fit wasn't.

(Switch sports, Switch pets)

Or you think a Remastered Mario collection will sell on nostalgia and attract people who were on the fence.

Or you think BOTW2 will be even bigger than 1 and attract new audiences.

Or you think unexpected Animal crossing level system sellers are to be expected on a yearly basis because it has apparently happened every year of the Switches life so far (games like Smash & Pokemon do not fit into this argument lmao)....

It's why at the very beginning when quoted for "parroting logic", I simply asked whether the person has an opinion. Obviously a saturation point lays ahead, meaningful discussing can be had about when we think they will arrive.

I'm very happy to talk about saturation points.  I wish more people would, because then it becomes obvious that, yes, Switch actually can keep selling.  Switch actually can have an extremely high saturation point, because it is selling to both home console gamers and handheld console gamers.  The potential market is much bigger than a traditional home console.  However, since this is the first hybrid console, we don't know in practice what the saturation point is yet.

How can we figure out the saturation point?  We need to know when the console peaks, that will be very roughly when we are at the half way point.  Aggregate video game sales approximate a logistic function (an "S curve").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function  

That link shows a math equation and graph, but in practice you get data and put a best fit curve onto it.  But basically the curve is shaped like an S, because the top represents total saturation.  Sales can't go past that.  The curve is growing at its fastest at the half way point.  This would be when game sales peak.  So if we know the peak, that will be when games sales are (approximately) half of saturation.

So the short version is that we need to know when the system will peak, and we can't really know that because it is the first hybrid system.  It's true that a system can't sell forever.  There is going to be inevitable diminishing returns past the point when a system peaks.  But the Switch hasn't peaked yet, so we don't really have a clue what it's saturation level is.  But saturation could be extremely high, because it is selling to both the home console market and the handheld console market.



Soundwave said:
tbone51 said:

What’s this post suppose to mean? Most of the NSW is sold out, so the extra units ship is gone. And it is the same with all systems with an extra model on the market. 

sorry I’m confused by what your implying o.O

It means that this year's Q2 isn't guaranteed to be the same/similar to last year's Q2, there was a large uptick in sales last Q2 from the Switch Lite launch and lots of people noted the initial shipment was very large to hold retailers over into the fall if need be because Nintendo was worried about tariff penalties kicking in. That could go either way. 

Ok so July-Sept quarter. I agree that Quarter was high, due to the Lite but we need to see how Q1 plays out first Q2 2019 had 4.8mil shipped. Depending on Q1, will they have demand met? Will sales go back to normal levels? Extra shipment is needed for storeshelves which is usual only a problem a console has when there are supply issue and only happens in the beginning of a console life cycle (Wii/ps4/NSW) 

Will Q1 cover that it will Q2 have to pick up from that? If the latter than Q2 will have been bigger than normal especially for shipments in July/august. Keep in mind that if the situation is the same throughout the next few months, Nintendo will have to ship everything they get while only holding back some for Q3



Marth said:
S.Peelman said:

Don't know if anyone already made this comparison, but I was curious about Wii software sales for last fiscal year. As usual, Mario Kart Wii remains impressive, having sold 120k still after all these years. What's also interesting however is that apparently Wii Sports is also still selling;

(..)

Net changes in shipment totals of Nintendo's first party Wii top 10;

1 Wii Sports +30k
2 Mario Kart Wii +120k
3 Wii Sports Resort +30k
4 New Super Mario Bros. Wii +40k
5 Wii Play +0
6 Wii Fit +0
7 Wii Fit Plus +0
8 Super Smash Bros. Brawl +20k
9 Super Mario Galaxy +10k
10 Wii Party +10k

Also checked DS, there no game has additional sales (while it does now say "as of 2020") compared to last year. Don't remember if that was also the case last year. For WiiU every game in the top 10 did +10k, except Super Mario 3D World and Mario Party 10, which both did +20k.

Haven't gone though every entry of the top 10 but from what I have seen the totals did not increase last year either. Our GameDB should be up to date on all big Nintendo sales.

Safe to say DS software is completely dead and without a digital storefront it will stay that way.

Yeah it probably is, it’s old though so I would’ve been more surprised if there actually were more sales.



S.Peelman said:

Don't know if anyone already made this comparison, but I was curious about Wii software sales for last fiscal year. As usual, Mario Kart Wii remains impressive, having sold 120k still after all these years. What's also interesting however is that apparently Wii Sports is also still selling;

Net changes in shipment totals of Nintendo's first party Wii top 10;

1 Wii Sports +30k
2 Mario Kart Wii +120k
3 Wii Sports Resort +30k
4 New Super Mario Bros. Wii +40k
5 Wii Play +0
6 Wii Fit +0
7 Wii Fit Plus +0
8 Super Smash Bros. Brawl +20k
9 Super Mario Galaxy +10k
10 Wii Party +10k

Also checked DS, there no game has additional sales (while it does now say "as of 2020") compared to last year. Don't remember if that was also the case last year. For WiiU every game in the top 10 did +10k, except Super Mario 3D World and Mario Party 10, which both did +20k.

Seeing Mario Galaxy ship another 10k in 2020 warms my heart. Mario Kart Wii continues to be the definition of legs, still pulling six figures in a quarter 12 years after its release, such a beast. God I love the Wii, so glad to see its numbers still ticking over well over a decade on from its launch.

tbone51 said:
For those that say that 20mil doesn’t look possible because of not knowing of software releases from here on out....why?


Nintendo won’t release as many games and people think Mario game’s won’t do as much as system sellers and possibly a paper Mario isn’t big? That the evergreens will keep on pushing in Q1-Q2 with no problem and if Nintendo in its 4th holiday won’t set up some good holiday bundles deals (Q3).

Demand is still thru the roof, people especially in japan want ring fit which seems to be the biggest OG model system now.

I think people are understanding Q1 and Q2 potential. If those are great Q3 doesn’t need to be as high as last years. A 20mil is 1mil less than last FY.

Then if all that does happen imagine when things get better and have a great 2021 year with slot of software more than usual. (BotW2/Metroid Prime 3/ZELDA Remakes/Pokémon Gen 4 remakes (or something else)

I’ll break down numbers soon

Evergreens aren't enough to keep a console selling more than 20m a year. They have great momentum now, but if they don't have big games for the second half of 2020 that momentum will slow and they'll be down YOY substantially when we get to the latter months of the year when the likes of Pokemon and Switch Lite hit in 2019.