First up on the docket is Nintendo earnings report Q1 earnings that runs from the start of April until the end June 2019.

If you aren’t familiar with the Nintendo stock and are looking for a little deeper reading then check out our last report on the annual report from Nintendo.

https://www.vdgms.com/stocks/2019/2/3/nintendostock

As for their latest report, there isn’t really a rhyme or reason or way in which these stats can flow so let’s just dig into it. Overall it was a pretty great quarter for Nintendo who are still riding strong on the success of the Nintendo Switch and its evergreen titles.

This past quarter, Nintendo had two million plus selling games which was Mario Maker 2 in 3 days at 2.42 million and Mario Kart 8 deluxe at 1.2 which is impressive considering that game has been out for a while now. The pure definition of an evergreen title and that brings the total sales for that game to 17.89 million. Nintendo first party games have always had such a strong lifespan. With the addition of Mario Maker 2, Nintendo now has 16 games for the Switch that have sold at least a million copies. As you may have guessed, all 16 of these titles are first party Nintendo games, which brings us right to first party Nintendo software sales are up 82.9% vs the same time frame in 2018.

It will be interesting to see what the next million sellers are at the next reporting as that will go from July to September. This will bring us right to the launch of the new Nintendo Switch Lite as well as The Legend of Zelda: Links Awakening.  I anticipate seeing Mario Maker 2, Links Awakening, Mario kart 8 and probably a few more based on the new people that will be entering the ecosystem with the Nintendo Switch Lite. 

In terms of software sales, Nintendo boasted 22.63 units sold which is up around 25% vs same time frame last year which is pretty impressive at the rate the system and software keep pacing forward. This now brings the total amount of Switch software sold to a total of over 210 million units in just a little over two years on the market. The attach rate is pretty decent too as each Switch owner has approx. 6 games in their library. This is a solid attach rate for the system but nowhere near as good as Nintendo has been in the past with some systems like the GameCube, DS, and Wii as they all had about a 10 game sold per every console.

As for how the sales broke down for the quarter, Nintendo Switch had 2.13 million units sold which brings the grand total up to 36.87. A couple of interesting things note, the first being that sales were up around 15 percent based on the same time frame in the previous year and secondly, this now bumps the Nintendo Switch into the top 15 consoles of all time in terms of sales as it bumps the Nintendo 64 down a spot.

The only figure they gave that seemed a little odd was that Digital sales only made up about 25 percent of their total revenue. As the Nintendo Switch is a hybrid console that can be quite portable I would have expected that digital sales would have been much higher especially considering that the market average seemed to be closer to 50 percent and in some cases a lot more. I assumed that the hassle of trying to pack all the cartridges with you on the go would have been enough for consumers to purchase most of their content digitally. The only explantation I could come to is that Nintendo games just have a certain nostalgia to them that you can't find with other systems. This combined with the fact that most Nintendo games, especially first party titles retain their value until the end of the consoles lifecycle and this could explain why so many people are purchasing their software in the physical format still.