Nintendo's Results For Fiscal Year Ended March 2022

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Okay, NOW we're at the hardware declining point.

Cool news—the long-awaited Nintendo financial results for their fiscal year that ended March 2022 has been released. See their explanatory material here and consolidated financial statements this way. Top line results are that from April 1 2021 to March 31 2022, they sold 23.06 million Nintendo Switch consoles across the family, and 235.07 million software games in that same time period (across all publishers). That makes for a lifetime total of 107.65 million Nintendo Switch units, and 822.18 million software units.

Nintendo is super excited that they will have restricted stock units now for their executives. That basically means their executives will have stock-based performance rewards that will encourage them to remain with the company and have it do well. They are also excited for a 10-for-1 stock split vote they are having this fall, as well as stock buybacks—which some investors asked them to do a year ago. That'd make 10 times as much stock in the market, so it should have the effect of dividing Nintendo stock price by 10. Why are they doing this? I have no idea. Companies do stock splits to make their stock more attractive/affordable to non-institutional buyers, but Nintendo's stock is already pretty cheap, I think.

Anyway, here's how some games sold. ...Oh, and I have one never-before-seen data table to add to this series after that, too!

I think it's accurate to say that Ring Fit Adventure is very much slowing down.
And it might even get knocked off the top 10 by Pokémon Legends: Arceus at 12.64 million and rapidly growing.

If you are really observant, you may have noticed some dots over December 31, 2020 that weren't there before. (That, and I made the chart more readable by adding minor gridlines.) That's because we got some numbers from the CESA White Book 2021, which is updated up to December 31, 2020 and has numbers directly from Nintendo. This finally means there is a reputable source that Fire Emblem: Three Houses has sold over three million copies (3.40 million, in fact)! And we also now know that ARMS is up to 2.56 million copies—the whole original point of me tracking these numbers was just to trash ARMS, after all. And there's quite a bit over it.

As for upcoming software, Bayonetta 3's release date is provided as “2022”, while both Advance Wars 1+2 Re-Boot Camp and Metroid Prime 4 have a TBA release date. Still, with Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and Splatoon 3 for sure releasing this year, along with an upcoming new Pokémon generation, Nintendo is feeling pretty good about their software sales—though they are projecting a hardware drop (21 million Switch hardware sales, for an 8.9% projected decrease) and a software drop (210 million software sales, for a projected decrease of 10.7%) for this fiscal year.

Let's compare those numbers with system lifecycle in this brand-new chart I made (that I can only supply every year as opposed to every quarter, based on Nintendo's “Consolidated Sales Transition by Region” report):

This measures percentage change in Nintendo system software and hardware sales across fiscal years since those have been introduced.

You are supposed to read that chart as, for example, in the first fiscal year (April 2001 to March 2002) that the GameCube was introduced, it had 100% more sales than the year before where it had none. Alright, that's a freebie. The second fiscal year (April 2002 to March 2003), the GameCube sold 52% more systems (5.76 million from 3.80 million) and 221% more games (46.14 million from 14.37 million) than the first fiscal year. But then from April 2003 to March 2004, while the GameCube still sold a little more software than the year before, it started selling less hardware (5.02 million GameCubes in that time period). Now, that's still a good number, but that second fiscal year was the GameCube's peak year and then it was all downhill from there. Remember, percentage change that is a positive number still means you sold more of a console than the previous year, which makes even single-digit increases very impressive.

But the most impressive Nintendo system since the 2000s is clearly the Nintendo Switch, matching the Nintendo DS's longevity for how much it has sustained the ever-growing year-over-year trends in terms of hardware, and being unsurpassed for software. Of course, Nintendo is projecting negative declines for both hardware and software between April 2022 and March 2023 compared to the year before, but it's an extremely impressive run. You can see, for example, how front-loaded the Wii's success was, especially for software where it fizzled out. I wonder if Reggie Fils-Aime talked about that in his book.

Nintendo really didn't supply much interesting commentary with the financial briefing, so I'm looking forward to the translated question and answer session to have something interesting to talk about. Or maybe it'll be decidedly uninteresting. Maybe they'll ask about all of these days... or what's going on with labour relations.


Let Ludwig know if you need a slower explanation of how to read that percent change chart, in case you just don't have an intuitive grasp of math. It's an easier to read chart than the million-sellers one, which is missing a large amount of million-selling games. But if they were all included, that would look even more messy and unreadable. It already reuses colours!


The third quarter's numbers are over here.
The year before's March 2021 ending article is located at this link.
Here is the translated question and answer session. It wasn't so interesting.
A quarter later and it's the first quarter of the year ending March 2023. It's not a good quarter.
How did things work out by the end of fiscal year 2023? Click here to find out.