3 Things We Learned From Nintendo’s Latest Financials
Every 3 months, Nintendo releases a report on the financial activity of the company, including detailed breakdowns of hardware and software sales that can often be quite illuminating. While the company doesn’t provide exact numbers for every single game it sells, it does give us detailed information about games that sold more than a million copies, and of course hardware sold.
Going through these documents is often quite dull and laborious – trust us, we’ve done so many times – but there are some genuinely interesting tidbits in there. We put in the work so you don’t have to, and have picked out the three biggest things we learned from Nintendo’s 2023/24 Q1 financial results.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is doing great
This probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone, but The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is selling spectacularly well. From the game’s launch on May 12 to the end of June, Nintendo sold 18.5 million copies of the Breath of the Wild sequel, immediately launching it into the console’s top ten best-selling games list.
It hasn’t quite caught up to Breath of the Wild yet – it’ll take some time to get above that 30.6 million mark – but given how strongly it’s performing, it’s almost guaranteed it’ll at least get close. As mentioned, the data provided in Nintendo’s report goes up until June 30, 2023, a little over a month ago, so it’s also very likely the game has already surpassed 20 million units by now.
The Switch is still going strong
After the failure of the Wii U, nobody expected the Nintendo Switch to become the third best-selling console in history. Through fantastic hardware design and a constant barrage of high quality releases, it didn’t take long for the Switch to climb the rankings, and it’s currently only being bested by the PS2 and the Nintendo DS. Surprisingly, despite the console being over 6 years old, it’s still selling very well.
Nintendo says that in the last three months alone, the Switch sold just shy of 4 million units, bringing it up to 129.53 million units in total. It still has a way to go to catch up to the PS2’s 155 million units sold, but it’s looking more and more like it may get close with every financials drop.
Metroid Prime 4 still doesn’t have a release date
Despite launching the excellent Metroid Prime Remastered earlier this year on the Switch, Nintendo still isn’t committing to a release date for Metroid Prime 4. The game was first announced at the first E3 following the Switch’s launch in 2017, but was rebooted in 2019 after the game failed to meet Nintendo’s standards.
Since then, we’ve heard pretty much nothing about it. There have been no trailers, no teasers, no screenshots, and not even a logo. Nintendo has said it’s still in production, and it gets a brief mention in the financials right towards the end, in the upcoming releases section. So what’s the release date mentioned? TBA.
