Are you guys going to wait Nintendo's sales report in February release to do the Switch vs DS 2025 December chart?

Nice to see this thread back again. Activity will probably just about cease completely after May but it's still got at least a bit of juice left.

I hadn't thought about that. I might wait or update it after the fact if adjustments are needed. Nintendo's earnings report drops February 3, likely at 1:30 am ET, which is where I live. 

Circana/NPD drops January 22, so I should have the rest of the estimates for December live later that day or at least by the following day. 

Hopefully this thread can be a bit less troublesome moving forward. :)

To stay on-topic: I’ll refrain from commenting too much on NS1’s LTD prospects until the upcoming fiscal report is dropped (in a couple weeks). If Switch missed its target, then it won’t hit 160mil. If it hit its target, then there’s a chance. If it greatly overperformed, then.. well… there’s a much better chance than before lol. If NS1 shipped 2mil this holiday quarter, then it remains 5.5mil ahead of NDS following Holiday 2011. If Switch maintains the same legs as NDS for the duration of its life, then we'd be looking at ~160.0mil. With how things have been with the economy as of recent, it's plausible NS2 could get a price hike which'll bolster NS1 sales... or NS1 could get another price hike (or perhaps an early discontinuation if it appears a PS2-PS3 situation is emerging) which'll kill any chances the system has at hitting 160mil.

In summary: Projecting NS1's LTD figures is about as productive as predicting the day of the rapture. There is literally no way any one of us could accurately make a call given what we know. Even if NS1 greatly outperforms target shipment data during Q3FY26, a price hike or early discontinuation would be a nail in the coffin.

Based on Nintendo's own forecast, they anticipate Switch 1 being at 156.12 million units by the end of this fiscal year. It was at 1.89m units shipped as of Sept 30th for the fiscal year, so it has 2.11m left to reach that mark and meet their projections.

Based on the current data VGChartz has now, the Switch 1 has sold 811,700 units to consumers in Oct-Nov-Dec, and that's not counting America, Europe, and Rest of the World figures for December, so the actual total should be even higher than that.

But if we subtract that 0.81m total from the current LTD sold to consumers figure, that brings Switch 1 sold to consumer sales to 152.20m units. Divide THAT number by the shipped to retailers' figure - 154.01m, and that leaves us with a sell-through rate of 98.82475164%.

Now let's take the current VGChartz 'sold to consumers' figure - 153.01. If we divide that by the sell-through rate percentage above, that would put the lifetime shipment figure currently at 154.83 million units - Again, that's without December data for America, Europe, and the rest of the world.

Obviously, we won't know the exact figures of the other regions until we actually get them. But that doesn't we can't projected based on data we have now. And I have a good idea of how to do that!
Go to October, take Japanese sales, divide them by the worldwide sales, and that's your percentage rate of how much of Japan accounts for the worldwide sales.
Like this: Japan October sales (98.7k), divided by worldwide sales (280.4k) gives us a percentage rate of 0.3519971469.

Now do the same for November.
Japan sales (111.4k), divided by worldwide sales (377k) gives us 0.2954907162

Now comes the questionable but fun part! Take those two percentages, add them up, then divide by 2: That's the (my) projected December percentage rate for Japan. Which is 0.3237439316.

Now take the Japan December sales (184.3k), divide that by the projected December rate I just listed. That gives as a worldwide estimate of 569.3k units for the month of December.

Add that 569.3k figure the ones we already have for October (280.4k) and November (377k) and that should give us a sold to consumers estimate of 1.2267m units, or 1.23m units if you want to round up, for the Oct-Nov-Dec quarter.

But wait! We're not done! No take THAT number and divide it by the .9882475164 sell-through rate I mentioned before. And that should give us an estimate of 1.24m units shipped for the holiday quarter.

Add THAT to the current lifetime figures and Switch 1 should be at no less than 155.25 million lifetime units shipped as of December 31st.
Finally, subtract the 1.24m projected figure from the 2.11m left that Switch 1 needs to sell in order to meet Nintendo's projections, and it would need to ship 870k in this last quarter for them to meet that 4m figure.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TL:DR - That's A LOT of figures I just presented, and there's a very good chance that the projections are WAY off. But in short, 155.25m should be the number to look out for when the Nintendo's next earnings release hits on Feb 3rd. If it meets or exceeds that, and, more importantly, if Nintendo maintains their projected figures or better yet, if they raise them, there's still hope.

Honestly, with seeing how November went for it, I can't see Switch doing 2M in the holiday quarter. It did 280k in sales for October, and 380k for November. For December, so far it's at 260k with Japan + rest of the world numbers. It may hit some 600-800k for the month. Even with 800k for December, it get's to 1.5M. Shipments by this time are equal or even less than the sold units. Therefore in the best case scenario shipments for the quarter should be no more then 1.5M. Lower end I would say 1M. It was around 1.9M shipped for the 2 previous quarters if I am not mistaken. Therefore with 1.5M more it should reach 3.4M. Maybe another 600k for the last quarter till end of March to make it to 4M? But more seems unlikely at this point.

I would imagine the difference between shipped and sold to hover around 0.5m rather then the 2m they usually had during the switches peak years. So nintendos earnings report should give us a better idea of the switches actual sales once its released in February. As I've a feeling its sales were under tracked here after the Switch 2 released. I find it hard to believe retailers kept 6 months worth of inventory kept in their warehouses rather then just ordering what they required.

The gap was over 2 million in March 2025. There was 152.12 million units shipped, while Nintendo said "global sell-through approaching 150 million units" at the time. That would put the gap at 2.13 million at a minimum. We had the gap smaller at the time, but had to increase it to match what Nintendo said.

Page 12 - https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2025/250508_5e.pdf

That gap makes sense for last March as the Switch was the only console that Nintendo was selling then. Plus 2 million was probably only 2 months of sales stock when they were selling 12m a year. Now that the Switch 2 has been released I can't see Nintendo having a difference of 2 million when that's probably going to be around 6 months worth of inventory in their warehouses. 

.

Guys, the 2m gap is explainable.

Famitsu doesn't track my Nintendo store sales etc in Japan.
In last Nintendo earnings report Nintendo switch had shipped 37.77m compared to 36.3m sold in famitsu.
A whopping difference of 1.4m.