Nintendo dropped its first quarter financial results on August 3, with the company revealing that it’s having a record-breaking year so far thanks to The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and The Super Marios Bros. Movie.
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In the earnings report, the company detailed just how profitable its products have been as of late. Tears of the Kingdom, for example, the follow-up to 2017's Breath of the Wild, sold 18.51 million units just between its May 12 launch and June 30, roughly a month and a half. That’s an impressive feat, and one Nintendo noted was largely driven by folks who had played Link’s 2017 outing. Tears of the Kingdom was so successful, in fact, that it not only propelled the company’s first-party sales to reach their “highest level ever” for a first quarter, but it also drove hardware sales. More on that in a bit, though.
“The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which was released on May 12, has made a major contribution to Q1 sales in the current environment, in which we see widespread adoption of Nintendo Switch hardware and continued play engagement by many consumers,” Nintendo said. “Sell-through of this one title constitutes approximately half of the first-party software sold this fiscal year. Consumers who played the previous entry, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, have been the primary driver, but as the weeks have passed, we have seen that a growing percentage of purchases are being made by consumers who have not yet played that title.”
Moving on to The Super Mario Bros. Movie, the company said 168.1 million people worldwide watched the animated film as of July 30 and its global box-office revenue raked in $1.349 billion. That’s wild. What’s wilder, however, is that the Universl Pictures-distributed film drove sales of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, which added 1.67 million sales to the tens of millions it has already sold.
This brings us to hardware sales. The company noted that the entire Nintendo Switch family had an increased 13.9 percent sell-through rate year-on-year, with the OLED model carrying most of that weight, though the OG Switch and Switch Lite are still selling well despite a slight slowdown in recent months. In the end, the handheld-console hybrid sold 3.91 million units in this quarter alone. This is a mega-popular system, y’all, and its recent popularity is largely thanks to Tears of the Kingdom.
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To cap all this off, the company said net sales for the first quarter of this fiscal year increased by 50 percent to 461.3 billion yen (or about $3.2 billion USD), increasing overall profits by 82.4 percent to 185.4 billion yen (or approximately $1.3 billion USD). So, yeah, Nintendo is absolutely killing it right now.