Nintendo sales on Black Friday 2018 and beyond

Nintendo has reported that for the period beginning Thanksgiving, moving through Black Friday all the way to Cyber Monday, their revenues were at more than $250 million.

The main contributor to these sales for Nintendo was the Nintendo Switch. The console helped Nintendo more than double hardware sales for the period year-on-year, increasing revenues by 115 percent in total. This sales period was not only the strongest the Nintendo Switch has ever had, but the best for a Nintendo console over a 5 day period also. Nintendo announced that in the US alone the install base of Nintendo Switch users is at 8.2 million.

In terms of games, Nintendo say they sold over 1 million first-party Nintendo Switch titles over the sales weekend. This was through a combination of physical and digital sales, increasing the number sold year-on-year by 78 percent.

Pokemon Let’s Go Eevee and Pikachu have sold 1.5 million copies since their launch the week before, and Super Mario Party passed the 1 million sales milestone in the US over the weekend. This makes Super Mario Party the fifth first-party Nintendo game to reach 1 million units sold.

Outside of the Nintendo Switch, hardware sales for Nintendo were up by 45 percent year-on-year. The Nintendo 3DS family hit the milestone of 22 million units sold, and the NES Classic hit the 2 million units sold milestone, while the SNES Classic reached 2.5 million total sales in the US.

Despite the Black Friday weekend successes, Nintendo still looks as though they won’t be able to reach their lofty target of 38 million Nintendo Switch units sold within 2 years. With the price of Switch consoles falling even outside of the sales weekend, and products such as Nintendo Labo failing to take off as well as Nintendo had hoped, the company’s share price has actually fallen by 33 percent since January 2018.

Cornelio Ash, an analyst with William O’Neil & Co Inc., said in a conversation with Bloomberg that all consoles that will go on to be great need a great second year, but the Nintendo Switch hasn’t had that. In fact it looks as though the goal investors had for the console to sell 90 million units within five years is near impossible at this point. Ash actually said that if the price of the console isn’t dropped to under $200 he doesn’t see Nintendo hitting their targets.

The company have many new entries in core first-party IPs such as Animal Crossing, Pokemon, and Metroid Prime planned for 2019, but the worry is that these won’t attract any new consumers to the console. While these games are appealing and generally sell well with Nintendo fans, they aren’t as successful with those outside of the Nintendo ecosystem.