After seeing the name, the article and the response thread made sense. At least quite entertaining.

On the other hand, this is probably one of VGchartz most successful articles ever, so he will get a good commission for all the views and Vgchartz would probably encourage more articles like it.

As dumb and uninformed as this article was, it surely did create a lot off buzz and I think this site dearly needed it. We even had threads about how boring VGC became and now soemthing finally happended again, so let's not forget what this site is all about at the end of the day: to discuss video game stuff. We've had a lot of entertainment with this article, haven't we? It doesn't need to be all rainbows and lollipops all the time, sometimes a bit drama is healthy.

After seeing the name, the article and the response thread made sense. At least quite entertaining.

On the other hand, this is probably one of VGchartz most successful articles ever, so he will get a good commission for all the views and Vgchartz would probably encourage more articles like it.

As dumb and uninformed as this article was, it surely did create a lot off buzz and I think this site dearly needed it. We even had threads about how boring VGC became and now soemthing finally happended again, so let's not forget what this site is all about at the end of the day: to discuss video game stuff. We've had a lot of entertainment with this article, haven't we? It doesn't need to be all rainbows and lollipops all the time, sometimes a bit drama is healthy.

It's a bizarre article to say the least

I'm totally OK with people having wrong ""opinions"", but that's a difference in having a wrong instance about something and straight up spreading of misinformation

Since there hasn't been a proper answer given yet, I'll chime in.

You are reading a revenue breakdown of what Nintendo gets from software sales. This means that they count only the royalty fees of third party game sales that are coming in and that is only a fraction of the total revenue that is generated by third party software sales. The sale of a unit of first party software generates 3.5 to 4 times as much revenue for Nintendo as the sale of a unit of third party software does, because Nintendo takes the developer and publisher shares of a first party game sale as opposed to only a small royalty fee from a third party game sale. Consequently, some rough maths tells us that if Nintendo holds 80% of the revenue in the breakdown you refered to (80% is four times as much as 20%), then in terms of actual unit sales, there would be roughly a 50-50 split between Nintendo games and third party software.

This checks out when looking up software shipments for Nintendo Switch which are compiled in this spreadsheet. The relevant columns are the orange one (total software) and the leftmost green one (first party million sellers). The LTD figures show 292.90m for Nintendo games among a total of 587.12m games shipped. This is roughly a 50-50 split, so the two different reporting methods we've been looking at here do line up and do not contradict each other.

Note 1: Nintendo only reports shipments for first party games that did exceed 1m units in any given fiscal year, so Nintendo's actual total is at least several millions higher than the aforementioned 292.90m due to ongoing back catalogue sales.

Note 2: Nintendo only reports shipments of games (both first and third party) which are available in physical form, of which they then include the respective digital versions as well. Or in other words, digital-only games are not accounted for in these totals.

Note 3: While note 1 above tips the scale more in Nintendo's favor, note 2 does the opposite because Nintendo themselves has very few digital-only games whereas there are tons of digital-only third party games. Ultimately, much of this should even out, so that the rough 50-50 split remains a credible assertion.

Anyone who's more interested in the balance between first party and third party game sales should pay attention to the stats by fiscal year. While the fiscal year ending March 2017 had Nintendo with roughly 60% of the unit sales, their share gradually decreased with each passing year. This correlates with increased commitment by third party publishers, so the obvious takeaway is that effort pays off.

Admittedly, I haven't read the article, but that's because I can't be bothered to read drivel where the bias is both known to VGC veterans and apparent to people who aren't familiar with the author. Just thought that it's never wasted time to explain what the various reported stats in Nintendo's fiscal reports actually mean.