Nintendo Revises Switch Sales Forecast

Three months after it last revised its Switch sales forecast downward, Nintendo has once again lowered its expectations for future sales. The news arrived as part of a financial filing for the current quarter, which ends on March 31.

Nintendo now expects its net profit to fall 5.8 percent to $2.6 billion on revenues of $9.8 billion, down 1.9 percent year-over-year (YOY). It has also modified its full-year Switch console sales forecast down by one million units to a total of 18 million units. That figure is down 5.3 percent YOY. Switch software sales will likewise fall, by 2.4 percent, to 205 million units.

As of the end of 2022, Nintendo sold over 122.5 million Switch consoles, vaunting it into third place all-time, ahead of the Game Boy and Sony PlayStation 4. In the most recent three quarters, the firm sold 5.22 million base Switch consoles (down 55.7 percent YOY), 7.7 million OLED models (up 92.5 percent YOY), and 2 million Switch Lite consoles (down 37 percent). So overall sales volume declined.

That said, the business is expanding in other ways: Nintendo reported that there are now over 112 million active Switch players annually, a big gain over previous years. (Nintendo provided a graphic but not the percentage change).

The Switch has been enormously successful for Nintendo but it’s possible that it’s time for a replacement. The firm discussed this shift during an investor event in May 2022.

“The question of whether we will be able to just as smoothly transition from the Nintendo Switch to the next generation of hardware is a major focus for us,” Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa said at the time. “Based on our experiences with the Wii, Nintendo DS, and other hardware, it is very clear that one of the major obstacles is how to easily transition from one hardware to the next.”

Then again, Nintendo could just release a 4K version of the Switch and ride the platform into an all-time first place finish for console sales: it would need to sell well over 30 million more units to surpass the current and long-time champion, the Sony PlayStation 2.