RolStoppable said:
It managed 1.45m. On topic: These results reaffirm that 2023 needs to see a Switch revision, because price cuts are off the table due to rampant inflation anyway. Likewise, a Nintendo Direct is due, because eventually Nintendo has to show something of Tears of the Kingdom as well as have more than "Pikmin 4 is coming in 2023" when we look beyond the release date of Tears of the Kingdom. Regarding the revised forecasts, Nintendo is going safe with hardware, but as usual too safe with software. This quarter may not have any big Nintendo release, but expecting a 40% decline year over year is a bit much. |
True. They are either gonna get aggressive to keep Switch going, or they're not gonna do anything and we will probably have Switch 2 in a bit over a year from now. Whether the Switch gets replaced in Spring 2024 or all the way to Holiday 2025 is really up to them and their lack or seriousness in keeping it going.
Price cuts COULD happen because presumably chips and cost of production are starting to go back down now with supply shortages starting to end, and Nintendo was certainly making massive profit on every system sold before supply problems hit considering they were already making good profit back in 2017 at launch, so if they wanted to they probably could do a price cut this year. As long as they can still be making profit on every system sold price cuts just make sense, because they make a lot more profit on every game sold and they get numerous games sold per user as well as some amount more of NSO subscription income.
But also a $200 Switch Home would probably capture a few extra million sales if they made one.
Also if they finally dropped old first party games whose sales have trailed off to $30 that could potentially bring in more hardware sales as people who have held off on Switch see they finally wouldn't have to pay $60 a pop for every Nintendo games. This would probably go hand in hand with a Switch Home because presumably plenty of the people who haven't bothered spending a few hundred bucks on Switch + games aren't interested in hybrid/portable play but would be willing to pick up a cheap home console with access to a bunch of half priced AAA games.
These are pretty much the options, unless they are just gonna let the Switch sail on out over the next year or so without making any moves to help it. Which would be fine, but as a Switch gamer I know there's numerous games that haven't released on the system yet that could easily fill up the next two years that I would like to see hit this gen. Given that they've long said the Switch is going to be a long lifecycle, you'd think they do plan to make moves late in its life to keep it going and keep selling games to its massive userbase, but who knows with Nintendo, common sense doesn't always apply to them. Maybe their long lifecycle talk was just hopeful thinking and they never actually planned to do anything extra to make it happen.
Only other thing they can do is have a bunch of huge games ready to get people interested in getting the system or upgrading to the OLED.
Maybe they'll announce big things in the Direct tomorrow. Guess we'll see.
