Fight-the-Streets said: Of course it's possible for Nintendo to miss the mark but certainly not by more than 1m. Why? 1. Nintendo has no reason to make ambitious forecasts for a console in its 8. year while the successor is already knocking on the door and 2. forecasts are harder to make during the strong years of a console's lifecycle as it's hard to exactly know how high the hype will really be, how long it will carry on and if really enough units can be produced to meet the possible very high demand but in the last 2-3 years of a console's lifecycle (before the successor arrives), naturally, it's way easier to make more exact predictions as there are clearly known facts (i.e. percentages of yearly declines) and less unknown facts (i.e. hype is gone, no production issues). |
Nintendo has adjusted their forecast by over 1M multiple times in just the last three years. FY 2022 (dropped by 2.5M) and FY 2023 (dropped by 3M). So it's not like they haven't adjusted forecasts recently.
But I do think you have a point about how revising forecasts isn't really as necessary, even in the face of slower than expected sales, because it's at the end of its life. The units will sell eventually, the system isn't going to get substantially cheaper to produce at this point, and they will want to focus on manufacturing Switch 2 anyway.