Nintendo shipped 6.49 million Switch 2 consoles from April through September, 37.4% fewer than in the same six months last year, when the system had just launched, the company said in its first-half earnings report on Nov. 5. The drop was steeper in the latest quarter. Switch 2 shipments for July to September came to 2.67 million units, down from 4.54 million a year earlier, a decline of about 41%.
Nintendo still expects to ship 16.5 million Switch 2 units in the fiscal year ending March 2027, the same target it set in May. That is down from 19.86 million last year, and it leaves about 10 million consoles to ship from October through March, a stretch that includes the holidays.
Games sold more while consoles slowed
Switch 2 software shipments rose 18.8% to 24.49 million units in the half. The biggest new games were Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream at 8.81 million copies, Rhythm Heaven Groove at 2.89 million and Splatoon Raiders at 2.42 million. More of it was digital. Digital sales rose 60.5% to 249.6 billion yen, about $1.6 billion at the company's average rate of 159.29 yen per dollar, and made up 60.7% of software sales. Nintendo's income from movies and other licensing nearly doubled, helped by The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.
Profit rose for the half. Net sales dropped 12.1% to 966 billion yen, while operating profit climbed 49.1% to 216.5 billion yen. Nintendo credits the larger share of software in its sales, along with about $300 million in refunds of IEEPA tariffs that cut its costs in the first quarter, and the company says it had mostly paid those tariffs itself instead of passing them on to customers.
Most of that gain came in the spring. Subtracting Nintendo's April to June results shows that operating profit for July to September fell about 16%, to 73.9 billion yen from 88.3 billion a year earlier.
What it means for buyers this holiday
The full-year forecast assumes about 100 billion yen in extra costs from rising component prices, particularly memory, and from U.S. tariffs. Nintendo already raised the U.S. price of the Switch 2 on Sept. 1, from $449.99 to $499.99, citing changes in market conditions, so the higher price covered the last month of the quarter. The new report does not announce another change. On Nintendo's US site, the Switch 2 bundles list at $549.99 with Mario Kart World and $529.99 with Nintendo Switch Sports Resort.
Nintendo's launch schedule from October onward includes The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Metroid Ravenous, Kirby and the World Beyond, and Pokémon Winds and Pokémon Waves, though Nintendo notes that dates can change and differ by region.
The original Switch is winding down: 1.27 million shipped in the half, down 32.7%, with 2 million expected for the full year.
Since launch, Nintendo has shipped 26.35 million Switch 2 consoles and 73.21 million Switch 2 games, according to its sales data page. The original Switch is at 157.20 million.
