The success of The Super Mario Bros Movie and the new Zelda video game helped to boost Nintendo’s bottom line on Thursday as the Japanese gaming company reported an 82% increase in profits.
It said its operating profit in the three months to 30 June rose to 185.4bn yen (£1bn), with the April release of the film – currently the biggest box office hit of 2023 – driving sales of Super Mario titles and the latest Legend of Zelda game also doing well.
Nintendo, which also makes the Switch console, said hardware sales had risen as a result, increasing nearly 14% over last year to 3.9m units.
The results underscore Nintendo’s success in extending the life of the long-running Switch system, which has sold almost 130m units, and using its roster of popular characters to boost revenue beyond the core gaming business. Sales in its business related to mobile games and intellectual property tripled to 31.8bn yen owing to the success of the Mario movie, Nintendo said.
The market is focused on the timing of a potential successor for the hybrid home-portable Switch, which has received incremental updates including a handheld-only version but is now in its seventh year on the market.
Serkan Toto, founder of the Kantan Games consultancy, said: “I think they’re going to ride out this fiscal year and squeeze the last bit of juice out of this system and then establish excitement for the new hardware sometime next year.”
The Kyoto-based gaming firm maintained its full-year forecast for the console of 15m units, which would be a 16.5% decline on a year earlier. This year Nintendo’s president, Shuntaro Furukawa, said the Switch target was “not a goal that we will be able to achieve easily”.
Nintendo said it sold 18.5m units of the new Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom, in the first quarter. The game has a score of 96 out of 100 on the reviews aggregator Metacritic, indicating universal acclaim. The Mario Kart 8 Deluxe game was boosted by the film, recording sales of nearly 1.7m units, pushing total sales to 55.5m units.
