On November 7th, Nintendo released its financial report for the second quarter ended on September 30, 2023. The report revealed that Nintendo's sales for the first half of the fiscal year reached 796.2 billion yen, marking a 21.2% increase compared to the previous year. The operating profit was 279.9 billion yen, up by 27.0% from the previous year. As of the end of September, the Switch had sold a total of 132.46 million units, with software sales reaching 1.13323 billion copies.
In previous reports, Nintendo's president Shuntaro Furukawa mentioned, "It's going to be tough to keep up the Switch's sales momentum in its seventh year after release." However, thanks to the hot sales of new game releases in the first half of 2023 (with "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2" selling 19.5 million copies and "Pikmin 4" selling 2.61 million copies), it has somewhat helped the Switch overcome its sales growth challenges at that time.
Intensified Competition in the Gaming Market: Nintendo Return to the Peak or need a new Breakthrough
In the console gaming market last year, Sony was at the top with a 45% market share, while Nintendo and Microsoft followed with market shares of 27.7% and 27.3% respectively.
Nintendo’s Switch, one of the best-selling game consoles worldwide, just took back the crown as the top-selling console of the month in March, surpassing its long-time rival, Sony's PS5. But recently, Sony announced that they will be releasing a new slim version of the PS5 and related accessories in China, with a slightly lower starting price. This could potentially impact the sales of Nintendo Switch. Meanwhile, Microsoft has completed its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, and with this deal done, Microsoft has overtaken Nintendo to become the world's third-largest gaming company in terms of revenue, following only Tencent and Sony.
Game industry analysts said: “With Sony and Microsoft launching their next-gen consoles, Nintendo's Switch series might start to seem a bit lacking in innovation."The development of PC and mobile games has been steadily taking over the market for console games, and in recent years, both Sony and Microsoft have started releasing next-gen consoles.
In this new era, the whole console gaming industry is facing a completely new challenge, and the situation doesn't look good. We don't know how well all these new attempts will work out, but it's always commendable to dare to make a change and step out of comfort zones.
Post time: Nov-21-2023
