Nope, the Switch should outsell the Wii before the end of the year (100.7 million vs 101.6 million, aka less than 1 million between them). 

Considering this year they managed to build and sell less than demand, and competitors (at least PS5) far less than demand, so the whole market still has more current gen potential buyers to satisfy, they could even wait for Spring 2024 announce and November launch.

Congrats Nintendo. The majority of 100+ million selling platforms (4 out of 7) are once again Nintendo platforms.

2023 is the soonest I think I personally would feel ready to move on from Switch, and the soonest that I think makes sense in terms of not cutting Switch short prematurely and flushing millions more sales down the toilet.

Switch could easily do another 40 million, but that could be cut drastically if they rush out a successor too soon, and people who would've bought both a Switch 1 and a Switch 2 will just buy 2, meaning lost sales and lost money.

If they put it out too soon they'll also be limiting themselves to worse tech for Switch 2 that will limit the games they can get.

The more I think about it, the more I think holiday 2023 is the sweet spot.

I know some will probably say Spring 2024 works just as well since Switch launched then and had great sales but I think if you announce Switch 2 in the mid-late part of the year than you are asking for a lackluster holiday 2023.

It really didn’t matter for Switch because Wii U was dead and 3DS was just kinda limping along so it’s not like 2016 was going to be have a killer holiday regardless.

As for other devices that launched in Spring, it wasn’t as big of a deal because the announcement of a new handheld wouldn’t affect the sales of their home console market and vice versa. Like if the 3DS announcement caused DS sales to plummet for the rest of 2010, it would have been fine because Wii was still selling well.

With that said, it wouldn’t be the end of the world if they launch in Spring but I think a Spring 2023 announcement with a Holiday 2023 launch is the way to go.

I get that a late 2023 launch is appealing, but every time I think about how they’re going to get sufficient quantities of hardware out in time with low defect rate and good home screen interface.  As well as shift development over to the new console quickly and successfully so there’s a big early hit and something else appealing at launch.  Then court and assist third party support and a solid pipeline of 2024 releases afterwards in a situation with shortages likely affecting first run and how work from home will continue to function.  There just seems to be a level of luck involved, and low margin for error to make it happen that I wonder if a company like Nintendo would be willing to take a risk.

Third parties will want details about timing and plans for launch that I’m not sure Nintendo will be able to give in mid 2022 when they’re helping them get set up with new dev kits.

It’s not easy.  They could risk screwing things up in a rush.  Or they could take it slow for a bigger launch, at the risk of letting handheld PC gaming devices get established and provide more competition.

I think about the logistics like the timing of when they can get their new support studios up to speed for next console development.  I don’t think I am correct about details and I may be wrong, but I want people to understand why some don’t see a 2023 launch as being as feasible as others.

It’s not all about me wanting slightly better hardware or wanting to milk another three million out of Nintendo Switch hardware sales.

Edit: A lot of my hesitancy is based around Nintendo only just finalising the concept for the Switch successor  during the past month, alongside witnessing how much slower these things move than many consumers would like.

Ah well, at least Switch can still match a lifetime of Wii U sales during 2023 if the successor does take a few more months than what people expect.

For the release date I can totally see Spring 2024 happening due to the pandemic delaying a holiday 2023 launch. Depends a lot on how willing they'd be to not have a good release schedule for the first few months.

Can't see them releasing a successor in the Spring of a given year because that would almost certainly mean it would be announced before the prior year's holidays. That would hurt that year's holidays.

This is basically like what someone else was saying here. They could get away with it with 3DS & Wii U because those systems were barely alive in 2016 (well a little bit more in the 3DS's case and a little bit less in Wii U's case).

Plus I'm sure Nintendo would prefer a holiday launch anyways. They probably wanted to release Switch in Holiday 2016 (and could get away with a March 2017 release for the aforementioned reasons).

I really don't get why they'd prefer a holiday launch. Launches are sold out, even the bombs, at full price with no discounts/bundles. They'd be sacrificing millions in profits by launching at holidays because people expect discounts then. No one expects a discount in March, which was a fantastic time to launch the Switch because they could sell at full price and games at full price for over half a year before discounting. And again, they would sell no more units at holiday than they would at launch because it would be sold out in the first couple months of it's launch regardless of when it releases.

Launch windows are meant to get the hardcore loyalists like me to spend tons of $, holidays are when the loyalists have already bought in and you now have to get the cheapskates/parents/non-loyalists/poor college students to buy in.

Nintendo needs to push out Switch successor launch as much as reasonably possible.
It needs to try and get the best tech possible for a reasonable price so it can get some of the PS5/XSX multiplats.