Soundwave said:
zorg1000 said:
Maybe they are, I’m not sure what the profits were for  Sony or Microsoft’s gaming divisions last fiscal year. What you have to remember is that while Switch’s overall sales are huge and it’s doing very well for its age, Nintendo only shipped 10.80 million units of hardware in the fiscal year ending March 2025 which would make it one of their lowest years ever. Fiscal year shipments (millions) 1991-19.93 1992-25.25 1993-24.36 1994-19.64 1995-10.39 1996-10.02 1997-16.58 1998-22.92 1999-23.09 2000-23.94 2001-22.78 2002-26.08 2003-21.41 2004-22.61 2005-24.59 2006-22.14 2007-34.47 2008-50.67 2009-57.55 2010-47.64 2011-36.21 2012-28.47 2013-23.73 2014-16.31 2015-12.57 2016-10.16 2017-10.77 2018-21.45 2019-19.5 2020-21.72 2021-28.83 2022-23.06 2023-17.97 2024-15.70 2025-10.80 In the last 35 years, Nintendo has only shipped this few units of hardware in FY94/95 & FY16/17. In the early 90s NES, GB & SNES were all going strong but by FY94/95 NES was dead, GB was showing its age pre-Pokemon/Color & even SNES had peaked. The other time was in FY16/17 when the DS/Wii era was long gone, 3DS was about 3 years past its peak and Wii U never took off to begin with. |
This is kinda the downside of having only one hardware line (effectively). This is why I think Nintendo will try in the coming years to expand the Switch 2, maybe a VR model, maybe a Switch 2 Pro type thing, maybe both, etc. etc. Unified library (basically) but more hardware options. It looks like the current hardware ceiling excluding the one COVID bump year in 2021 is about 23 million max, I think Nintendo would like that ideally to be higher. |
Yeah it’s one of the cons of a unified ecosystem for Nintendo but overall the pros outweigh that by a ton.
With the exception of the few low periods and the massive DS/Wii era, 20-25 million units per year seems to be pretty standard.
