Following Nintendo’s announcement of declining profits in its most recent fiscal quarter, president Shuntaro Furukawa has announced that the company currently has no plans to pursue further price hikes. As reported by Reuters, much of the declining sales in the recent quarter for Nintendo has been attributed to the Switch 2 price hike from earlier this year.
The company had confirmed that its operating profits had declined by around 16 percent to ¥73.9 billion for the quarter ending on September 30th, which roughly translates to $468 million. Sales went down by around 15 percent, which was noted as being a larger decline than Nintendo had been expecting.
Despite this, however, the company has remained confident for the rest of its fiscal year, with its 3 percent profit growth forecast still holding true. In the meantime, however, Morningstar’s director of equity and research, Kazunori Ito, has expressed the belief that this decline was expected, despite having arrived earlier than expected. He also noted that “investors have cooled on the Switch 2 platform” in the midst of the console’s second year.
Nintendo also revealed that the Nintendo Switch 2 sold 2.67 million units in the quarter, which has resulted in a total lifetime sale of 26.35 million for the console. The Nintendo Switch, in comparison, sits at lifetime sales of 157.2 million units. On the software side of things, 15.04 million copies of Nintendo Switch 2 games were sold in the quarter, with the Nintendo Switch selling only 610,000 games. This indicates that Nintendo console users have largely moved on to the newer platform.
The company’s most recent game release is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake, which came out just this week. Along with a visual overhaul, the title also features many other new features, including a dedicated jump button. In an interview, program director Hiroki Taguchi, along with director HokWai Ng and series producer Eiji Aonuma, said that the jump button was added for the sake of players who became Zelda fans after experiencing Breath of the Wild.
“In the original game, there wasn’t a button assigned to jumping,” explained Ng. “It was designed so that Link would automatically jump when players pushed the Control Stick forward in specific locations, so the places where jumping was possible and where it wasn’t were clearly defined. However, players who are used to more recent games may wonder, ‘Why is it that Link could jump over there, but not here?’ So, for Link’s jump, we carried over the controls from more recent titles in the series and made it possible to jump anywhere with a single button press.”
On the subject of the remake’s art style, Aonuma said that the team makes these kinds of decisions by figuring out what would be the best fit for the story that is being told in each game.
“I think something that’s kind of interesting about Zelda is you often have a very big graphical shift of art style from one title to the next. But for us, it’s all about finding the best fit, like what works well with the game and what we’re trying to do here. It’s not just change for change’s sake, of course.”
