Well, Nintendo currently plans to ship 16.74 million Switches by April 2018, and selling more than 20 million for FY 2018 implies even higher shipments.

With how Nintendo has been low-balling its shipment forecast most of this year (they did not revise the guidance in July when it was obvious to everyone it was going to blow past it), I could see 42 million Nintendo Switches shipped by April 2019 and based on current stocking and sell-through rates that would be around 40 million units sold through.

The crux of all that is keeping demand up with supply, which has been very easy for Nintendo this year given their world class first year line-up.

If Kimishima believes next year will sell that much more, then he is confident in the software lineup and production capacities for that to happen in his conservative forecasting tendencies.

This is all very good news, and indicates Nintendo Switch will have a great line of games all next year with hardware sales to match. :)

If he's putting this number out there, it tells me that at least Pokemon is making 2018, because there's no way they're going to get anywhere close to those numbers without it. Smash Bros. and/or Animal Crossing might make 2018 also, given that they'll almost definitely need more heavy hitters like those to sell systems to the order of magnitude Kimishima is proposing.

I still have the impression that some games that were planed to release on the Wii U were postponed to release on the Switch. Also I think that some games of last year (Zelda, Mario Odyssey) were finished developed some time before release day so that they would be released on the fitting moment.

Consequently in my opinion the Zelda team is already working on the new Zelda since around 1.5 years.

As someone who can't really justify buying a Switch at current pricing as I only really want to play Mario Odyssey I'm hoping for a price cut. They need to do something in Europe as it hasn't been as successful as the US or Japan over here. I'm unsure at the moment how the Switch has faired over Christmas and how third party US and European titles are selling. Is interest in Switch rising, falling or stable? What are the levels of Switch owner's satisfaction with the console? Difficult to get the full picture at the moment. Also difficult to see if Nintendo are more motivated to maintain a high margin on the hardware or actually sell more units to generate more software sales. How sure are they of the success of their upcoming software titles?

My gut instinct is the Switch may not achieve those sales at current pricing and interest has waned slightly and it needs something to maintain momentum. That's looking from a UK perspective though and the US and Japan looks to to be on a different level.

I've not read many comments from owners saying how much they are using their Switches compared to other consoles if they own them too.

Ash isn't in the games, and a dark Pokémon won't sell as well as the current version.

Pokemon, Animal Crossing and Smash would help sales especially in the other markets. Japan would do great regardless since Switch is a hybrid.

I'd say that's conservative.

Breath of the Wild wrapped development February 3rd of this year. So it was only about a month before launch. I don’t know about Mario Odyssey.

I also believe this. Summer to fall is my guess.

With great deals for next black friday 

Not really. They start the work of the next Zelda game even before it's finished the actual one. Of course it's not if full production, but general concepts or mechanics must have been tested already.