Nintendo Q1 profit down as pandemic gaming boom slows

Nintendo’s first-quarter net profit fell nearly 13 per cent as the video-game lockdown boom lost momentum, the Japanese firm said on Thursday, after reporting record earnings in the previous financial year. Long periods of stay-at-home orders and other restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic fuelled a run of good fortune for game-makers worldwide. But analysts warn of a slowdown in demand for indoor entertainment as vaccines help life move towards normality, despite the spread of the Delta variant. Nintendo said it generated 92.7 billion yen (€712 million) for the three months to June, compared with 106.5 billion yen in the same period last year. It left its forecast for the year to March 2022 unchanged, still expecting to report a 340 billion yen net profit on sales of 1.6 trillion yen. The firm posted its highest ever annual profit in 2020-21, propelled by the runaway popularity of its Switch console and the family-friendly game ‘Animal Crossing’. “Hardware and software sales in the first quarter of last fiscal year were substantially driven by the March 2020 release of ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons’,” Nintendo said in a statement on Thursday. “So compared to then,...