Nintendo quarterly sales update (To March 31st 2023) Switch 125.62 million

[Wman1996]

Soundwave said:

Never really heard the "our sales forecast is a stretch" line before lol, doesn't sound like they are too confident. Furukawa is blunt I guess.

Think this points pretty strongly to Switch 2 in 2024. All the talk about the current Switch having a long product cycle left seems to have been replaced with "keeping sales momentum of a system this old is very hard". They know they are in the end portion of this product cycle from how they are talking. 

Looks like no new hardware coming this fiscal year to give the current Switch a boost either. Switch OLED is your Switch Pro, it always was, changing the chip would've cost Nintendo too much money for not enough of a gain. 

I suppose it's good to be blunt in this case, no matter when the next system releases. 

A lot of people interpret Furukawa's early 2022 quote of

"Switch is just in the middle of its lifecycle and the momentum going into this year is good. The Switch is ready to break a pattern of our past consoles that saw momentum weakening in their sixth year on the market and grow further." 

as meaning Switch was pretty much exactly halfway in its life. But beyond that, a few even interpret it as meaning that it's probable that Switch won't get a successor until early 2027.

Lifecycle does not inherently mean the duration between a platform's release and the release date of its successor. It usually means how long a platform is available before being discontinued (and there are some sales after that, but only remaining stock). The Wii U only lasted from November 2012 to January 2017. It couldn't even survive until the Switch's release in March 2017, or slightly beyond. 

if Switch 2 launches at any point in 2024, I think it's still pretty likely that Switch can hold on until early 2027 or even 2028-2029. It depends how much Nintendo can make off of it and if enough people are still buying the software. The DS has a disputed discontinuation date. Some say as early as Q1 2014, but some say not until some point in 2015. Nintendo clearly didn't consider the DS worth it enough anymore to keep manufacturing until 2016 or 2017. Even with greatly declining sales, it may have slightly surpassed the PS2 if it lived until then. But Nintendo wasn't interested in surpassing the PS2 just for the sake of it, and they already had enough platforms to worry about supporting at the time.