Two Hundred Nine Million Units, One Noun

The hardware-and-software summary table on page 5 of Nintendo's English earnings presentation for the year ended 31 March 2026 carries four quantities: Nintendo Switch 2 hardware, 19.86 mil units; Nintendo Switch hardware, 3.80 mil units; Nintendo Switch 2 software, 48.71 mil units; Nintendo Switch software, 136.91 mil units. Individual titles get their own callouts elsewhere on the same page — 14.70 million units, 8.85, 4.52, 3.94 — and nothing stops you from adding the four table lines. They come to 209.28 million units. Two of the four are consoles and two are copies of games, and the table gives all four the same noun, so the addition is arithmetically valid and the total refers to nothing.

In Japanese the two things take different counters. Hardware is 万台, software is 万本, and the reference table on p.26 of the Japanese deck is headed 販売数量（単位：万台・万本）— one header holding two units, which the reader assigns by row. The historical workbook of consolidated sales units uses the same paired header on all four of its sheets. The English p.26 has a single header, units in ten thousands, and it sits above the hardware block and the software block together. The title callouts read million units; the quarterly charts are labelled (mil units) on the hardware axis and the software axis alike.

In the two presentation decks the word that names the basis appears in one place each, and both times in the same position: the heading of p.5 — Sell-In in the English file, （セルイン） in the Japanese. Shipment does not occur in the English file at all. The earnings release of 8 May 2026 uses 販売台数 twice and 販売本数 three times, and 出荷, 販売実績 and セルスルー zero times each. 販売数量 appears there once, in a sentence sending the reader to the presentation for the forecast assumptions.

The securities report filed on 25 June 2026 keeps this inside the MD&A. There is no standalone 【生産、受注及び販売の状況】 item; what holds it is sub-item (3), 生産、受注及び販売の実績, in section 4 — Production, orders received and sales information, pp.17-18 of the English translation. The sales table has two lines: dedicated video game platform ¥2,239,541 million and IP related income etc. ¥73,510 million, totalling ¥2,313,051 million, which ties exactly. The table prints its own dollar column beside the yen — 14,085, 462 and 14,547 millions of dollars — at the ¥159 to 1 USD the report names as the approximate current rate. Dollar figures elsewhere in this piece are converted at ¥163.8 and do not agree with it. Orders received are stated as omitted, production being to forecast except for part of the software. The cells are yen.

The production table above it is built the same way, and carries its own dollar column too: dedicated video game platform ¥1,919,326 million against 12,071, other ¥8,941 million against 56, and a printed total of ¥1,928,268 million against 12,127, where the two yen components add to ¥1,928,267 million. The report's basis note gives the convention that produces the ¥1 million, and gives it for a different document: each amount in the accompanying consolidated financial statements is rounded down to the nearest one million yen, so totals need not agree with the sum of their components. The production table sits inside the management discussion, outside the scope that sentence states. A footnote says the production amounts are computed at selling prices. Neither table carries a line saying whether the movement underneath the yen is shipment or retail, so from these two tables the basis is not readable.

The counts are in the securities report, in the prose. Page 15 of the English translation reports 19.86 million units of Switch 2 hardware, 48.71 million units of Switch 2 software, 3.80 million and 136.91 million for Switch, and Mario Kart World at 14.70 million units, in sentences. That document says on its first page that it is a translation of the Japanese annual securities report and that the Japanese originals prevail. So the quantities exist in English. They exist as sentences, which is a different object from a table with a header, a unit and a basis note.

What one 本 contains is set out in four notes on p.26 of the deck. Software units cover packaged software and the downloadable version of software also sold physically; download-only software and add-on content sit outside the count. Packaged copies of Nintendo Switch 2 Edition software go into the Switch 2 line and downloadable copies of the same titles go into the Switch line. Upgrade packs bought separately are not software units. Actual units include copies bundled with hardware or other products; forecast units do not.

Run those rules through the Switch line and the ratio misbehaves in a specific way. Switch software of 136.91 million units against Switch hardware of 3.80 million units over the same twelve months is 36.0 copies per console, because the numerator sells into an installed base — cumulative Switch hardware is 155.92 million units at 31 March 2026 — and because part of that numerator is the downloadable version of Nintendo Switch 2 Edition titles, which the notes count as Switch software. The two lines share a page and a noun and are not a ratio.

The Switch 2 line is the one that decomposes. 48.71 ÷ 19.86 = 2.45 software units per console. Note 1 on p.12 supplies the piece that moves it: approximately 12.60 million units of Switch 2 software and 0.96 million units of Switch software were bundled with hardware or other products during the year, of which about 0.51 million Switch units went in the box with Switch 2 hardware. Bundles are 12.60 ÷ 48.71 = 25.9% of the Switch 2 count. Take them out and (48.71 − 12.60) ÷ 19.86 = 1.82.

That is the figure comparable with next year's, because forecast software units exclude bundles under the same note. The deck prints 60.00 million units of Switch 2 software for the year to March 2027, +23.2% on 48.71. Matched on perimeter, 60.00 ÷ 36.11 = +66.2%. The Switch line runs the other way: 105.00 against 136.91 prints as −23.3%, and ex-bundle, 105.00 ÷ 135.95 = −22.8%. Both the percentages and the note that defines what they compare are in the same file.

One split the unit notes do not reach is first-party against third-party. The term third-party appears once in the English deck, in the heading of p.20, a list of announced titles. The inference runs backwards, from p.25, which defines Proportion of First-Party Software Sales as first-party software sales over total dedicated video game platform software sales — a ratio whose denominator has to hold both. The securities report's sales table is one line for the platform. From these documents the first-party share of 48.71 million units is not separable.

A third perimeter for 本 lives on the IR site. The Switch title page, as of end-March 2026, lists ten titles by cumulative worldwide consolidated units in 万本, and its notes say downloadable versions are included and copies bundled with hardware are included. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is 7,108万本. The ten add to 34,137万本 by my addition; the page prints no total. Against cumulative Switch software of 152,814万本 that is 22.3%, and the two figures are not stated to run on one perimeter: the qualifier limiting software units to packaged copies and the downloadable version of software also sold physically sits in the notes of the sales-units-by-period tab, and nothing says it reaches the cumulative tab where 152,814万本 sits.

Regional units are on p.26 of the deck and in the chart on the IR quantity page, for the two current platforms only, in the same four regions — 日本 / 米大陸 / 欧州 / その他 in the deck, with 国内 for the first of them in the chart. Switch 2 hardware runs 566 / 673 / 440 / 306, which adds to 1,985 against a printed 1,986; Switch 2 software runs 1,317 / 1,748 / 1,237 / 570, adding to 4,872 against 4,871. The note says each figure is rounded separately, so totals and the sums of their parts need not agree. Switch hardware and software both tie, at 380 and 13,691.

The securities report's regional line is yen: Japan ¥534,924 million (US$3,265.7 million), the Americas ¥935,251 million (US$5,709.7 million), Europe ¥551,468 million (US$3,366.7 million), Other ¥291,405 million (US$1,779.0 million). The four add to ¥2,313,048 million against the printed ¥2,313,051 million; the ¥3 million (US$18,300) is truncation at the million-yen level, the convention the annual report states. Sales are allocated on customer location; the property, plant and equipment table beside it is allocated on asset location, in three regions rather than four.

Set the yen shares beside the unit shares. The Americas are 935,251 ÷ 2,313,051 = 40.4% of consolidated net sales and 673 ÷ 1,986 = 33.9% of Switch 2 hardware units; Japan is 23.1% of sales and 28.5% of units. Price is the obvious candidate for the gap and these documents cannot supply it. The yen line holds hardware, accessories, amiibo, software of all kinds, Nintendo Switch Online and IP related income; the unit line holds Switch 2 consoles. The segment note reports a single segment, so a regional profit figure is not among the disclosed items to test it against either.

Digital sales are ¥407.6 billion (US$2,488 million), up 25.0%, and the printed proportion is 54.6%, up 1.1 points. The denominator is given in the p.6 footnote as total dedicated video game platform software sales; p.25 lists the numerator's components — (a) downloadable versions of packaged software, (b) download-only software, (c) add-on content and (d) Nintendo Switch Online, etc. — and separately defines a different ratio, a/(a+b+c+d). The same numerator over the whole platform line is 407,600 ÷ 2,239,541 = 18.2%; over consolidated net sales, 407,600 ÷ 2,313,051 = 17.6%. One name, three numbers, and only the first is the company's.

The 54.6% is also a lever. Implied software sales are 407.6 ÷ 0.546 = ¥746.5 billion (US$4,557 million); the rounding on 54.6% puts that between ¥745.8 billion and ¥747.2 billion (US$4,553 million to US$4,562 million). Subtract it from the securities report's dedicated video game platform sales line of ¥2,239,541 million — one document's software figure against another document's platform figure — and ¥1,493.0 billion (US$9,115 million) remains for hardware, accessories and amiibo. Divided by 23.66 million consoles that is ¥63,100 (US$385) each, which is not a price: the numerator carries accessories and amiibo, the denominator carries consoles, and the yen series and the unit series were drawn on different perimeters to begin with.

The definitions do not travel evenly into the machine-readable layer. On the IR quantity page the notes defining hard and soft and the scope of the software count sit inside an embedded chart's data rather than the page's HTML; the cumulative tab carries one note, that the figures are worldwide consolidated life-to-date; Wii and earlier platforms are served as image alt text. The historical workbook counts in 万台・万本 across four sheets, and its regional columns go from three to four at the Switch generation, when Europe was separated — so その他 before Switch and その他 after are different sets. Its trailing years are collapsed as well: the first sheet ends in a FY3/2015 ~ column and the second in FY3/2024 ~, while nothing before FY3/1998 has a year column at all, so the earliest platforms survive in the cumulative column only.

The English deck is built on the Japanese one, in a way that surfaces only on extraction. Behind the English axis labels on p.15, the text layer still carries ten pairs of 年 and 月期 spans in 7.9pt YuGothic, underneath the Meiryo English labels drawn over them. The bullets in the reference pages are U+30FB, the katakana middle dot, while the body slides use •. Neither touches a number. Both run in the same direction as the noun on p.5.

One more table in the same filing counts something else. As of 31 March 2026 foreign corporations and other foreign entities hold 6,595,429 of the 12,843,224 trading units, and foreign individuals another 7,909 — 51.41 percent together, from the printed 51.35 and 0.06, added by the reader because the form provides no line for the sum. The median across the 3,167 companies whose tables we reconciled from EDINET is 7.31 percent. The unit here is a unit of stock, not of hardware or software, and it is the one unit in this piece that carries no ambiguity about what is being counted.

Sell-through is in the same file, kept to its own slides. P.15 is headed Hardware Sell-Through and Annual Playing Users, and its bars carry no axis values. P.16 gives two Pokémon titles at over 4 million units of global cumulative sell-through in six weeks and in five weeks; p.19 gives another at over 3.8 million in two weeks, all of them floors rather than points. Annual playing users are about 129 million, the same as the prior year, under one note: Nintendo estimates. Sell-in and sell-through are two sets of slides, never two columns of one table.

The four lines on page 5 add to 209.28 million by my addition, then. It is the only figure in this set that carries no note, because there is nothing in it to define. Everything else — what a 本 contains, whether a copy in the box counts as one, which console's line a download belongs to, which denominator a percentage runs over — takes a note, and the notes are where they are: p.12 and p.26 of the deck, one line in the release on Nintendo Switch 2 Edition downloads, four notes under the title table on the IR site, a footnote inside the chart data on the IR quantity page, the feet of the workbook's sheets. The addition works. The units were never the same unit.

On the arithmetic: yen amounts are converted at ¥163.8 = US$1, the rate on 24 July 2026, applied uniformly to every period here. The English annual report prints its own dollar column at ¥159 to 1 USD; where that column is quoted it is quoted as printed, and the two sets of dollar figures do not agree. Dollar figures keep the significant figures of the yen amounts they translate and are rounded independently, so converted components need not add to converted totals. Unit counts, percentages, ratios and shares are not converted. Figures derived rather than published — the 209.28 million sum, the ten-title total, the ex-bundle attach rates, the implied software sales and the residual per console — state their arithmetic in the text where they appear.