Nah expectations, I think it is a fair statement to say that the next quarters could be lower in sales compared to SW1. I would agree based on what we know now but so much can change, will the price go up?  What games will get announced? what kind of bundles do they have? More exclusive deals? What games will skip SW2?  Will COD or any rockstar game make it soon on SW2 etc.

You’re telling me the game that launched alongside the fabled Switch Pro (i.e. Switch OLED) and was the big “one last thing” at E3 2021 recieve little fanfare from Nintendo? I wasn’t even interested in Nintendo during 2021 and I knew how big of a deal Metroid Dread was— the marketing was crazy for that game!

BTW to those who think NS2 is about to blast straight through that 19mil forecast from Nintendo, you may need to keep your expectations in check: Furukawa revealed in the investor meeting that NS2 forecast remains at 19mil since only a little over 15mil of the shipped 17mil have sold, i.e. they overstocked in anticipation of the holiday rush (a strategy they used for NS1, in fact). So shipment data may appear a tad bit deflated in Q4FY26, just as it was for NS1 in Q4FY18 (and as is regularly seen with PS5).

That said, I’d expect 2-3mil shipped for Q4FY26 w/ sales returning to normal 3-4mil levels afterwards.

And Dread had one thing that should be essential for all Metroid games going forward; It was fucking terrifying.

Yes, I am telling you that, the OLED is not Switch Pro and Prime 4 got the "one last thing" treatment too, and got much more exposure overall than Dread did. Dread was used more for the OLED marketing than for its own marketing.

I still could not understand why investors were freaking out and had to do some investigation. The exact reason for the freakout has to do with margin on hardware. So to be specific, the margin Nintendo was getting from the original Switch was sky high for obvious reasons. This Switch 2 margin is already strained from rising prices for componets like ram and things like tariffs. In November, sales were far lower than anyone expected. Nintendo responded by doing a $50 price cut going into December which is their best month. Sales were pretty good, but the margins were even lower due to the price cut. So, revenue did not meet expectations and neither did profit. By the way the profit was actually just shy of $1 Billion... (Imagine making a billion and being called a failure at the same time... crazy)

This shows us just how screwed the whole system is. Nintendo is punished for not selling enough units at a higher price and ALSO, they are punished for selling more at a cheaper price. There are two ways out of this. A) Ninendo raises prices to mitagate loses to margin. As a consumer I think this is a terrible solution. B) Figure out how to get your hardware costs down.

If Nintendo is able to find a way to get its costs down this will drive its value back up. They are down a whole third in the last 6 months. I imagine that something exactly like this could effect the next PlayStaion. I suspect they will probably increase the price of their subscription to finance the lower (and potentially lower than zero) hardware profits. Microsoft is looking at all this and there are like 'f this'. They will solve the problem simply by passing all the costs to the consumer.

But this also explains why there will be no Switch price cut. Everything make more sense now.

Does anyone have any ideas on how they could get their margins up without beating up cunsumers?

If you want a tidbit of how screwed the console industry is, Phil Spencer admitted a few years ago that Microsoft deliberately produced less Xbox Series consoles than they could the first 1-2 years because they lost money on console sales so for profit reasons they deliberately produced less Xbox consoles. That shows that some consoles deliberately choose a strategy that would give them a smaller install base than they otherwise could have had.

Apparently Metroid Prime 4 did pass a million combined after all

https://www.gonintendo.com/contents/57358-metroid-prime-4-beyond-surpasses-1-million-copies-sold

That's good but it needs to do better numbers.

1.5m is the number that's seems to have been mentioned.