Amazing sales all around!

Mario Kart looks set to cross the 30m lifetime mark after this quarter. Breath of the Wild should cross 20m, even if the sequel will be here by late 2020. Smash, Pokémon, Mario will cross the 20m mark as well. 

This reminds me of the Wii and DS days when Nintendo's titles sold insane numbers for years and years. And Switch hardware will easily pass 100m units lifetime. 

What these numbers show is that it was definitely the right decision to merge the home console and handheld divisions for Nintendo. They can put so much more resources into just one console and each of their titles gets full attention by the market - compare that to the Wii U / 3DS days when most major franchises would get a game on both devices. 

One more thing: I really hope Nintendo gets the message consumers are sending when it comes to Zelda games. Zelda is a game about open worlds (Links Awakening was as open as a game could get on the Gameboy) and not puzzles. But world-building is hard and the biggest danger I personally see for them is becoming lazy with the franchise again and "forgetting" to put enough energy into world-building. Twilight Princess's world was partly modelled after Ocarina of Time. Skyward Sword did not have an open world at all. They've been reusing A Link to the Past's world on the 3DS. They've remade Link's Awakening. And they are going to recycle Hyrule in Breath of the Wild 2. They are lazy world-builders, with Breath of the Wild being the glory exception. Zelda as a franchise is incredibly popular right now, but that can change. So I hope they get the message.

So should ship about 20.5m this FY. ~55.2m shipped

My prediction of 22m when they announced the Switch Lite was a little too enthusiastic.

Edit: Just saw Nintendo's revised forecast of 19.5m for the year...

But shipping just 1.76m units in Q4? Last year they shipped 2.47m, that would be down considerably YoY which seems insane.

But if they have a lot of units on shelves it makes some sense I guess.

Graphics improvements sell games...... being stuck on 3DS, alot of people wanted to see a pokemon game running at better resolutions ect.
Same thing could happend with Switch 2, if the jump visually is big enough.

I think it has more to do with combined home/handheld tbh. Switch is taking series sales to new heights, and I don't think that can be simply put down to graphics. After all, every previous generation has been a "graphics improvement".

It's combined sales of people who mainly game on TV and people who mainly game handheld.

I think they know their bussiness best. I'm kinda happy with it, it may lead to Switch Pro this year.

from this:

To this:

Its a huge improvement.
Even if pokemon still has ALOTs of room to grow in, visually.

You cannot give all the Pokemon success due to higher quality of the game, or that the Switch is just selling well.
Alot of people were tired of Pokemon being stuck on 3DS and running low resolutions, and wanted a better looking game.

Thats probably the main "boost" this pokemon game got imo.

The numbers shipped should be way over last years' final quarter, i'd say at least 3.47, what with Animal crossing coming. There's not many OG Switches at all sitting on store shelves, just lites. So hopefully Nintendo get the balance right when shipping for this quarter. Your prediction of 22m shipped may be perhaps optimistic but 21m+ seems possible if not likely.

God dang. Those numbers are insane.
Nintendo knows how to make best selling games.

I'm glad Astral Chain crossed the million barrier especially as a new IP and debut for the games director.

On another note BOTW'S total with the new numbers is 18m plus.

Nintendo are terrible at forecasting, their 18m forecast was obviously too low from the moment they released it, just as their 20m forecast the year before was obviously too high to everyone except them.

That being said I don't see any situation where they ship literally double their forecast for the next quarter. It's a short-term forecast now they can't be THAT wrong. I could maybe see them shipping 2.5m compared to the 1.76m forecast, but any more then that would be really pushing it imo.