The Road to 160m+ for Nintendo Switch

[trunkswd]

RolStoppable said:

The forecast of 4.5m for this fiscal year is low, but Nintendo is coming off a fiscal year where they've revised down twice and still fell short a bit. For the FY ending March 2019 they projected 20m and ended up with just under 17m which led them to forecast a cautious 18m that turned out to become just over 21m. It has been common throughout Switch's lifecycle that Nintendo's forecasts have been off by a noteworthy margin, and the final tallies happened to be equally either over or under their original expectations. That's why I commonly say "if Nintendo hits their target" because it's exceptional when their forecasts for just about anything are on point.

But regardless of if you think that 4.5m will be accurate or is a result of Nintendo erring on the low side this time around, what's clear is that the OLED model will take a big hit this fiscal year. There's not much of a point in a premium model for an old console when the next gen can be bought for $100 more. I've talked about exactly this a few times before in this thread. It's the Lite and the original Switch which will have to do the work to get past the 160m mark and they've declined year over year by only 22% each compared to the OLED's 37% drop.

In any case, this FY's 4.5m target is a lot more feasible than last FY's 13.5m. A year ago we had to speculate what Nintendo has in the bag to accomplish their lofty goal, but this time around it's probably easy to agree on Nintendo not doing much of anything.

Unless the economy crashes and the tariffs situation in the US gets worse, I expect Nintendo to reach its forecast for the fiscal year and possibly beat it by a little bit. 15 million for the Switch 2 also seems cautious.