Nintendo has released its financial summary for the first quarter of the 2025 fiscal year (since the company tracks its year starting from April), and profits aren’t looking great, although there’s arguably a good reason for that.
Per the company’s financial highlights, “ordinary profit” and net profit are down 55.3% on a year-over-year basis, while operating profit has fallen by 70.6% compared to the first quarter of last year, which is a pretty precipitous drop. Net sales, meanwhile, are down 46.5%.
Arguably, however, that’s to be expected. We’re in what is probably going to be the final year of the Nintendo Switch’s life before the Switch 2 is released, and so major releases for the existing console are drying up, although both Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD were released in this first quarter.
It’s also worth noting that, as Nintendo itself points out in a supplementary document, sales were buoyed last year by the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which was a huge seller for Nintendo (as you’d expect given that it belongs to one of the company’s tentpole franchises).
Additionally, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which was released last year and which proved phenomenally popular among moviegoers, further bolstered Nintendo’s sales in the first quarter of the 2024 fiscal year, and it’s obviously unable to do so again this quarter. In short, Nintendo had a pretty extraordinary year last year, and there’s nothing quite as totemic to help the company out so far this year.
However, that’s not to say that Nintendo is doing poorly. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door has sold 1.76 million units to date, according to Nintendo, and Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD is currently sitting at 1.19 million, both fairly respectable figures for games that aren’t mainline Mario releases.
In general, Nintendo’s latest financial report paints a picture of declining profits and sales for the company, but given that we’re at the end of the Switch’s lifespan (and a hugely successful lifespan at that), this kind of decline is entirely predictable.
We’ll have to wait and see whether Nintendo does anything to turn things around, but it’s likely that the next major Nintendo franchise releases will arrive alongside whatever the Switch 2 turns out to be. Stay tuned for more.
