Nintendo Made a LOT of Money Last Year

You don’t need me or anyone telling you that Nintendo is doing well for itself these days - we just recently reported that the Switch has already sold 1.5 million units and doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon—especially as its library grows more diverse and impressive. But number of sales isn’t actually that important to a company: what’s more important, at the end of the day, is profit. And in that respect, Nintendo and its shareholders have some real news to celebrate - they are rolling on that sweet cash money.

In a quarterly financial release, Nintendo announced that it ended last year and started this one with 482.97 billion yen in revenue (or around $4.44 billion USD), surpassing its earlier forecast of 407.86 billion yen. Compared to last year, the company earned 261 percent more. And thanks to this early success, they’ve gone ahead and increased lifetime sales projection of the Switch from 14 million to 15 million, which is still a fairly conservative goal, considering the Wii managed to sell 101 million units in its lifetime and the Nintendo DS reached 154 million.

From their statement:

For the nine months ended December 31, 2017, the Nintendo Switch hardware sold well following the launch and sales volume rose substantially during the holiday season. For the Nintendo Switch software, Super Mario Odyssey was released in October and has been a big hit, with global sales reaching 9.07 million units. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, released in April, has sold 7.33 million units, and Splatoon 2, released in July, has sold 4.91 million units, bringing to 8 the total number of million-seller titles for this fiscal year including the titles of other software publishers. The result is that hardware sales during this period totaled 12.13 million units, and software sales volume totaled 47.10 million units.

They also cited strong sales of the 3DS, the SNES Classic Edition, and some moderate success in the mobile field as contributing factors.

The good news to come out of this for gamers is that these numbers are sure to turn some heads at third party publishers and developers. Companies have already started to slowly wean themselves back into Nintendo’s side of the console war and with this announcement, it’ll sure be a heck of a lot easier for all parties concerned.

All the same, this news doesn’t otherwise mean much for us. Unless you were a Nintendo apologist.