Nintendo Profits Down, Animal Crossing To Blame

Last year was not a great year by literally anybody’s standards. By fortunate luck, however, right as everything was closing and everybody was isolating a little island life simulator by the name of Animal Crossing: New Horizons was hitting shelves and racking in the profit for Nintendo. With all of us wanting to pretend we were anywhere else the game offered gamers a solid form of escapism in those trying times. A year later, Nintendo can’t seem to escape the perfect storm of profits it created.

According to Nintendo, the game set an amazingly high bar, selling 22 million units by June 2020. While software and hardware, sales have actually remained relatively steady since then this insurmountable profit set by the game has caused net sales and profits to actually decrease.

The company stated:

Nintendo Switch hardware and software sales both remain steady, but overall sales declined compared to the same period of the previous fiscal year, when Animal Crossing: New Horizons was a major driver of the Nintendo Switch platform business.

As noted in the company’s fiscal report for the same period of time this year, net sales have decreased 9.9 percent and account for 322.6 billion yen ($2.9 billion), while profits have decreased by a whopping 12.9 percent and account for 92.7 billion yen ($845.6 million). The company has also stated that new titles such as Pokemon Snap, Mario Golf: Super Rush, and Miitopia have all performed well upon release. However, Animal Crossing and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Continue to perform near the top of the Nintendo Switch charts.

To be clear, any decrease in the company profits will not in any way damage Nintendo or cause a course correction in what they are doing. Animal Crossing simply hit the market at the exact right time hit sales numbers even the company did not predict the game would have. Moving forward we should see these sales numbers begin to even out.

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