Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (released in May) got off to a good start with sales of 18.51 million copies in its first couple of months.
That’s a pretty spectacular result for the launch of any game, and Nintendo saw huge gains in the quarter as a result, the company reported today.
On top of that, Nintendo’s movie spurred game sales. The April release of The Super Mario Bros. Movie positively impacted sales of Mario related titles, with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe recording sales of 1.67 million copies, the company said.
As a result of these factors, hardware unit sales increased 13.9% year-on-year to 3.91 million units, and software unit sales increased 26.1% year-on-year to 52.21 million units.
Nintendo said that digital sales rose 35.9% year-on-year to 119.6 billion yen, helped by the depreciation of the yen combined with good sales of downloadable versions of packaged software for Nintendo Switch and increased sales related to Nintendo Switch Online.
In the mobile and IP related business, the combination of an increase in income from royalties and the high level of audience engagement with The Super Mario Bros. Movie resulted in overall sales of 31.8 billion yen (an increase of 190.1% year-on-year).
The end result is that overall sales reached 461.3 billion yen, with sales outside Japan of 369.0 billion yen accounting for 80.0% of that total. Operating profit came to 185.4 billion yen. With the depreciation of the yen in foreign exchange markets, Nintendo recorded foreign exchange gains of 47.2 billion yen, with the result that ordinary profit totaled 253.7 billion yen and profit attributable to owners of parent totaled 181.0 billion yen.
While the numbers for the quarter are good, Nintendo did not change its forecast for the full fiscal year ending March 31, 2024.