(i should've just multi-quoted you lol.) Not sure if “bold” is the right word: Nintendo had been making a big statement about how they would meet Switch 2 demand, and seeing that that JP had 2.2mil pre-order requests, it then must follow Nintendo would likely be seeing nothing short of 5mil in June alone (2.8mil from EU+NA is a conservative estimate according to JP demand). And knowing that demand would not slow down, expecting 3-5mil for the Fall quarter & 10mil for the Christmas quarter fall very in-line with reality.

15m shipments in 10 months will be basically the fastest of all time if achieved afaik. With the numbers you've put they'd be doing about 22-24m in 10 months, shipping over 50% faster than the previous fastest selling console of all time. 18-20m in 7 months was never on the cards.

That would’ve been very similar to NSW1, only with a slightly strong holiday & a much stronger launch. You can say the numbers are big and therefore unrealistic; but 2.2mil in JP is also pretty large as well.

The forecast Nintendo gave is similar to NSW1, the numbers in your post are about 50% better lol. Switch 1 launched in march and did 15m in 2017, your post has the Switch 2 doing 18-20m with 3 less months on sale.

oops i forgot how slow Switch was in 2017 compared to 2019-2022. Ig my projection was more in-line with how Switch was doing during 2019-2022 (10mil during holiday, 4-5mil during Fall) with a strong launch. I will die on the hill that this was a perfectly sound projection! These aren’t insane figures for a mid-gen system; these are rather strong numbers for a new system. Switch 2 had 2.2mil JP preorder requests (which Nintendo said they wouldn’t be able to meet) and Nintendo made a big deal about meeting demand. So, the dots connected, and we land at Switch 2019-2022 figures.

PS5's 9.5 million holiday quarter isn't the highest on record. Wii, DS, and Switch all did far higher but the rest of your post is spot on.

You are correct my bad. It was the highest holiday quarter for a playstation console ever.

It isn't weird. While Switch 2 is the successor to one of the best-selling consoles of all-time, this doesn't guarantee that it will smash all records. It's also a more favorable position to be in when you have to revise your forecasts upwards instead of downwards. Pre-order data will certainly factor into Nintendo's forecast, but high initial demand doesn't linearily scale to demand throughout a fiscal year. And while Japanese pre-order numbers were higher than Nintendo expected, the same doesn't need to hold true for the rest of the world where the numbers might fall into exactly the range that Nintendo had anticipated; the thing is that Nintendo has never talked publicly about their expectations, so this can't be quantified.

What might make all of this weird is when you yourself are among the people who got carried away by the question this thread asked and got into the territory of unrealistic expectations, so what is perfectly normal business procedure suddenly appears to be weird. The next substantial updates to this thread's question will come in late October/early November when we can gauge Switch 2's sales momentum as well as the impact that Sony's PS5 price adjustments had. What is pretty much required is that Switch 2 overperforms and the PS5 underperforms, otherwise it's a foregone conclusion; but that has basically been the premise all along.

Forecasts can definitely be revised up or down as time goes on, and I do see Nintendo's forecast for Switch 2 going up. I'll still maintain that I can see 20m by March 2026 (and over 17m by the end of 2025). Nintendo is probably just being cautious. At the very least, this signals to me that there isn't going to be a huge unannounced Switch 2 exclusive released later this year. What they've already announced is likely it for the rest of the year (not a bad thing).

People should stop being quite as over the top optimistic about the Switch 2 now. It having nearly half the votes in the poll is ridiculous, the PS5 is obviously massively favoured due to having an extra 5 months so June onward would've been a better comparison. Sony's initial PS5 shipment forecast for the next fiscal year should be higher though it will have an extra couple months which reduces that difference and I expect Nintendo to have a better shot of beating their forecast than Sony.

Daniel Ahmad said it's cause of the tariffs due to them wanting to soften the price increase in the US which does make sense to me since if they just did a gigantic price increase there they would be completely killing the brand in the only major region where it still has some relevancy. Even then the US got a relatively big increase since they can only spread it out so much.