The Switch is in its eighth year. That’s longer than any Nintendo system has gone without getting a successor. But the company is still bullish on the hybrid console’s future even as fans wait to hear about a Switch 2 as soon as this September. Nintendo is planning to sell over 12 million new Switches this year and everyone’s asking the same question: how?
Nintendo’s latest earnings report running from April through June was bad. Really bad. People expected it to be bad but it was somehow even worse than that. With no major first-party game like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and no massive pop cultural splash in the form of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, profits for the Japanese console manufacturer were down over 70 percent.
Here are some other interesting takeaways from Nintendo’s latest financial report:
- Remasters of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and Luigiʼs Mansion 2 HD 1 both sold over 1 million copies each
- The breakdown of digital sales to physical sales jumped from 47.3 percent in the same period the year prior to 58.9 percent this time around
- Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom sold more last year than all first-party games combined this year
- But only sold an additional 1.3 million copies in the last nine months
- Zelda: Breath of the Wild actually sold more than TOTK last quarter
- The Switch has reached 128 million individual players
- The 3DS is dead but Nintendo still sold 60,000 games for it last quarter
Can the Nintendo Switch still outsell the PS2?
The big news though is that Nintendo still plans to sell 13.5 million Switches this fiscal year. It’s already sold 2.1 million last quarter, which means it somehow needs to sell 11.4 million more this summer into the holiday season and beyond. If achieved, that would put it in spitting distance of the lifetime sales of the PlayStation 2, the best-selling console ever, known to have sold 155 million as of 2012. Maybe that’s why former Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan’s parting gift was to move the goal posts by announcing that the PS2 (which he helped market) ultimately went on to sell 160 million units.
It’s still possible the Switch could hit that number years into the lifecycle of a successor like a Switch 2, but analysts are skeptical given the lack of officially announced big sellers in the pipeline and the fact that total Switch sales the year that both Zelda: TOTK and Super Mario Bros. Wonder came out were barely 15 million. “I really wonder how Nintendo wants to achieve their hardware sales target,” Tokyo-based analyst Serkan Toto told Bloomberg today. “I am skeptical if Nintendo still has enough fuel in the tank, especially if they plan to get to the target without hardware price reductions.”
A price cut is indeed one way that Nintendo could spur on new sales. While the company released the cheaper Switch Lite at $200, the stronger seller continues to be the Switch OLED at $350. Knocking $50 off of that hardware, which is running on several-year old specs at this point, would be a big deal. It’s also possible that Nintendo is still holding one or two big surprises up its sleeve for the fall and winter. And we shouldn’t underestimate the power of Super Mario Party Jamboree—Super Mario Party remains the seventh best-selling game on Switch—and The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom could be a system mover despite its more old-school look.
But without a new Pokémon game this year, it seems more likely that 2024 will be the Switch’s weakest since 2018. Maybe there are a few more special edition Switches laying around. The gold one for Echoes of Wisdom does look sharp, and convincing players to buy newer limited edition models while passing their older ones down to younger family members or friends is traditionally how Nintendo juices its handheld metrics. We’ll see if that’s the case this time around and the Switch threatens the PS2 for best-selling console of all time or stalls out like everyone expects.
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