@Ail: You could buy 2 million copies of 333 different games.
That would make you quite a software beast.

See people everywhere have it wrong.
If you want something you like you don't make it yourself or buy a company to do it.

You buy a lot of it and then every company in the world will try to make something you like :P ( of course the restriction is that you are able to buy enough to represent a very significant portion of the market).

Wow *blinks* Ninty's swimming in money... O_o

It's not that hard to visualize where the money is coming from. Divide $5 billion by the number of Wii users plus DS users:

$5 billion / (100.19 + 48.79) million = $33 per user.

Of course, in the beginning of the fiscal year the userbases were smaller:

$5 billion / (68.8 + 23.1) million = $54 per user

So something between $33 and $54 per average Nintendo customer.

These calculations are not perfect but they should help ;)

Those are helpful figures, NJ5, thank you.

I wonder how much they make off of licensing fees...

Hmm... This seems like too much profit.

The last we heard they projected a profit of around 3 billion dollars for this year. And that was down from 3.4 billion.

Could this have anything to do with the strong yen? I thought that would have an opposite effect.

Where did the extra 2 billion come from?

I'm not sure I believe this rumor.

Page 2 of this pdf.

Their latest forecast for operating income was exactly 530 billion yen. Maybe you're thinking of income before taxes instead?

@Killergran: The Reuters article implies it's Nintendos own estimation, not rumour.

Thanks. But no, I don't think that's it. I think it's the yen's new value, if anything.

EDIT: Oh, yes. That's a much newer report. Last I read was an earlier quarter.

It might be nintendo's own estimation, but it's not the reported profits. So I used the rumor. Bad choice of words, perhaps.