A very strong quarter for sure and their hardware and software forecasts will be met guaranteed now even assuming the next three quarters are all down YoY. Releasing a Mario film and TOTK just a month apart was a smart move and now they have no reason to release the successor the first half of next year. The Switch definitely has enough life left to last another year and three months with no issue.

It's the confirmation I needed to understand how lowballed my prediction for TOTK was hahaha !

As most could've expected, this Q1 was pretty positive all around for various obvious factors such as TOTK, the Mario Movie hype, etc ...

Software sales went up massively compared to other Q1 too.

Leading to believe that Q2 will be somewhat more than decent enough due to Pikmin 4 release and trinkling down benefits from other previous factors. So this year so far make it seems like they are low balling this holiday season knowing full well they have an upcoming Super Mario Wonder in the same year of the movie ...

This is gonna be wild !

Why were you expecting it to sell 10mil less than BotW?

There are now more Switches in the world than there are people in Japan.

That was actually already the case after the previous quarter update.

Yes and no. On one hand 22m is obviously huge.. on the other hand, the sales have already fallen off a cliff and TotK is going to outsell it very shortly. Nintendo knows Zelda shouldn’t be outselling mainline Pokémon if everything was going peachy with that franchise and honestly Scar/Vi should have been able to fly past 30m on the current install base. So I do think the brand has taken a bit of a hit. Obviously it’s still far too massive for it to look bad, but if Nintendo is paying attention they’ll see the games didn’t realize their sales potential anywhere near what they could if a ton of bad word of mouth about the game quality wasn’t spread. 

Mario Wonder sales are going to be just bonkers. I actually think it would challenge MK8 if it wasn’t so late in the life cycle, but I’d say that makes it impossible.

TOK may very well overtake Hogwarts as the biggest game of the year

Honestly that bolded part is simply not true anymore. BotW is over 30m and still selling well. Only the original Pokemon has sold more, and by the end of the year BotW will have surpassed it. And very possible TotK passes both Sw/Sh lifetime, meaning the top three sales places between the two series will probably be 1. Zelda 2. Pokemon 3. Zelda. The days of Pokemon outselling Zelda are over (at least for now).

Switch had 5 Pokemon games in less than 7 years. The three side games are gonna end up around 15-16m range, and the two mainline games are gonna end up in the 25-26m range. Those 5 games will probably end up around at 98-100 million. I don't think Nintendo is worried.

Should Nintendo start making sure Pokemon hits a certain quality level...yes absolutely. But Pokemon has sold PHENOMENALLY on Switch so it's not like Pokemon sales are disappointing anyone. Sure, as the first open world pokemon, if V/S had been a masterpiece instead of a bug-fest, and probably if they hadn't just released TWO other Pokemon games in the prior 12 months, it could have sold 30+ million. But then again they're gonna end up with probably 56-57m sales on 3 pokemons released within 12 months of one another. Nintendo ain't ever gonna complain from a sales perspective about Pokemon this gen.

Side note / pokemon scheduling rant:

These latest pokemon launches were just poorly timed. They threw out Arceus right after BD/SP because they had to stick to their 3-year mainline cycle, and it wouldn't have made sense to hold the partially open world Arceus until after the fully open world V/S came out because that would look like a step back. So Arceus needed to come out with at least some lead time before V/S, but that squashed BD/SP and Arceus together, with still not much time between them and V/S. Nintendo and the Pokemon Company should have broke their 3 year mainline cycle, and done BD/SP holiday '21 as they did, but then done Arceus holiday '22 (with more dev time put in), and then V/S as the big holiday title this year to hit after Mario Wonder.

Arceus would have been a huge holiday title and likely be a 20m+ seller if it had 12 months instead of 2 months separation from BD/SP, plus more dev time to polish it a bit more, plus didn't get cut off like three weeks after release by the announcement of V/S coming later in the year. BD/SP mighta picked up an extra million or two sales as well. Then with an extra year to significantly polish and improve V/S and selling on release to an even larger user base V/S might have hit 30m even with the other two games picking up an additional probably 6-7 million sales.

But no, Pokemon MUST stick to its 3 year schedule. With increasing graphical fidelity now that Pokemon games are on Nintendo's powerful 'console' system rather than the underpowered handhelds of yesteryear, and if the games are going to be open world now, they absolutely NEED to extend their mainline schedule to at least 4 years if they don't want every game to be even more of a buggy mess than V/S was at launch. The games will still sell well, but the series will gradually lose favor if they don't increase the dev cycle.