Tears Of The Kingdom, Super Mario Bros. Movie Raised Nintendo Profit Forecast

The 2023 financial year has been a roaring success for Nintendo, with multiple game releases during the first half of the year. According to the Japanese publisher, every game released within the first six months has recorded strong sales across multiple IPs, which helped ship more Nintendo Switch consoles.

However, the most significant contributor was the success of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and the Super Mario Bros. Movie that helped Nintendo record a 21.2% Year-on-Year (YoY) boost in net sales of to ¥796.2 billion ($5.3 billion). This is according to Nintendo's Financial Report Briefing, which also detailed that the publisher marked a 27% increase in operational profits, which capped at ¥279.9 billion ($1.9 billion).

During the six-month period, which concluded on 30th September 2023, Nintendo announced that every game released within this time frame exceeded expectations, recording strong sales at and post-launch. This was led by The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which Nintendo revealed had moved 17.6 million copies, making it in the top ten best-selling game releases for the Nintendo Switch.

While it has been seven years since the Switch’s release and with talks of a successor in production, Nintendo has confirmed that multiple Switch games, including third-party games, had crossed the million units sold threshold throughout the first half of the fiscal year. This boosted its hardware sales by 2.4% to 6.84 million units, with its OLED model being the most significant contributor, with 4.96 million units, and the standard and Lite Editions not far behind, according to additional reporting by GamesIndustry.biz.

Speaking of driving sales, the release of the Super Mario Bros. Movie helped boost their mobile and IP operations by 133.3% YoY to ¥55 billion ($365.8 billion). Software sales also grew within this time frame by 1.8% to 97.08 million units, which slightly increased their forecast to 185 million units sold, a five-million-unit increase from their previous forecast.

The second half of the fiscal year is already recording solid sales with the releases of Detective Pikachu Returns, Super Mario Bros Wonder, and WarioWare: Move It since 1st October 2023. Nintendo is hoping to continue this trend with a handful of releases to close out 2023, including Super Mario RPG and Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s second DLC, The Indigo Disk.