September 30, 2021 Nintendo Quarterly Financial Update

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Plus, a couple of sales notes about a third-party company's games.

In the last week, Nintendo released financial disclosures and a lengthy presentation for the first six months of the fiscal year (April 1 2021 to September 30 2021). Today, they released a six-question Question and Answer session that I don't find important or interesting enough to warrant its own article.

In terms of financial highlights, the total number of Nintendo Switch hardware units is at 92.87 million, and software has climbed to 681.00 million. Compare that to a quarter prior when it was at 89.04 million and 632.40 million, respectively. However, Nintendo has cut their annual Nintendo Switch hardware forecast by 1.5 million consoles to a total of 24 million consoles to be sold by March 31, 2022, due to the semiconductor shortage. (However, they have projected they'll sell 10 million more games from 190 million to 200 million, retaining their overall net sales forecast of 1.6 trillion yen.) They've also revised their exchange rate for Euros to yen to be from 1 Euro = 120 yen to 1 Euro = 125 yen. I'm mentioning these things because people at the 81st Annual General Meeting of Shareholders were questioning why Nintendo assumed that Euro exchange rate to begin with when other Japanese companies assumed differently (and more accurately), and in earlier Question & Answer sessions they wondered why Nintendo was pretending there wasn't a semiconductor shortage.

All of the year-to-year numbers are way down because of how much Nintendo outperformed in the second quarter last year, back when everyone was buying tons of Animal Crossing: New Horizons and staying at home playing a lot of videogames was considered socially acceptable and was generally normalised due to Chinese Communist Party Virus-induced lockdowns. By late 2021, that's considered weird again. That's perhaps a reason why Nintendo is doing a bunch of out-of-the-home initiatives, like planning to open a new Nintendo Store in Osaka, Japan by the end of 2022. Super Nintendo World will have a Donkey Kong area sometime in 2024, and the next theme park will open in Hollywood in... an undisclosed year. And maybe to go along with being outside the home, Pikmin Bloom exists. ...No one has explained how it makes walking more fun, however.

I re-added New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe to this just to laugh at how Ring Fit Adventure surpassed it.
That said, Ring Fit Adventure is literally in the top 10 now, so it's not below-top-tier anymore. That makes this chart even more misleading.
Though I'm sure (unfortunately) it'll be kicked out of the top ten by the next financial disclosure with the new Pokémon titles.

In the Q & A, Nintendo reiterated that all of this intellectual property expansion is ultimately to build interest in their dedicated videogame platform business (which is right now the Nintendo Switch, but Nintendo definitely wants you to know they're very actively working on the next big thing as well) and less for its own sake. And if you're wondering why everything is only in a few places like New York and Hollywood and Tokyo, that's because Nintendo wishes to avoid “excessive exposure and expansion.” That means anything in flyover country would be considered excessive, so feel free to stay home there. (Or feel free to help revive the tourism industry. Though last time I was in Tokyo, I didn't get to do anything fun.)

Meanwhile, there are now over 32 million Nintendo Switch Online subscribers. Since this is all about data that ended September 30, we don't yet know the effects of things like Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack or even the Nintendo Switch (OLED model), but Nintendo is pretty psyched about how they think it'll revitalise the Switch and have it continue to be growing in a sixth year, which would be rather unprecedented for Nintendo console lifespans. They're particularly excited about people purchasing the new model to replace their old Nintendo Switch.

That does look like a nice age distribution.
If anyone says Nintendo is just for kids, you can show them this chart.
You could also just show them KoopaTV in general. ...Though they might get another impression entirely.
By the way, the games presented at the bottom are a chronological release thing. (I guess they stopped after Animal Crossing.)
It's not supposed to match up with the age distribution, though Nintendo made it quite confusing to look at.

With regards to the third-party, it's CAPCOM. Nintendo went out of their way to say that global sales of Monster Hunter Rise has reached 7.5 million units. But as for what CAPCOM themselves have to say, they were happy to announce, in their own financial disclosure, that Monster Hunter Stories 2: Wings of Ruin has already sold 1.3 million copies. They... didn't mention The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, but it's implied that it's sold about 400,000 copies across all three of the platforms it's available on. You can compare the before and after: 8.2 million Ace Attorney franchise sales as of June 30, 2021 (before the release of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles) went to 8.6 million Ace Attorney franchise sales as of September 30, 2021. You should buy it and help the series out. I don't have knowledge of CAPCOM's internal financial projections on whether or not 400,000 copies (which could be rounded up... or rounded down...) is a success or a failure. But I do know that more is better.

In general, more Nintendo Switch games are being purchased by third party publishers than by Nintendo, which would be an unusual trend for past Nintendo systems. But that's the new normal for the Switch. It's a healthy ecosystem all around!


Let Ludwig know if there's anything else in Nintendo's financial documents that you think is worth his commentary on. There is a lot of material he sort of just overlooked and ignored because it wasn't interesting to him, but if it's interesting to you, then speak up in the comments section!


The previous financial disclosure was for the quarter that ended in June 2021. That's when Ring Fit Adventure got into the top 10.
Here is the article from a year ago for the quarter that ended September 2020. That's when New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe got kicked off the chart.
Read the post-holiday December 31, 2021 financial update!
Next year brings a September 30, 2022 financial update... as well as a new Corporate Management Policy Briefing to examine! (New age distribution chart too!)