Nintendo Explains Why They’ve Downgraded Their Units Sold Forecast for the Switch
Last month Nintendo announced that despite the Switch selling very well, they would end up missing their 20 million units sold mark and were set to downgrade their expectations from their original number down to 17 million. Nintendo ended up missing its original, ambitious forecast for selling 20 million units of the Nintendo Switch this fiscal year. Even though the Switch is selling very well, it won’t meet that target, and Nintendo has now downgraded their forecast to 17 million units.
There has been a lot of speculation made as to how and why Nintendo wasn’t able to hit their original target. Some analysts have pointed out this likely has something to do with the fact that the company had a weaker first half of the year than what they were hoping for. While this definitely makes sense, during a recent Q&A session Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa chimed in about why exactly they’ve downgraded their target for this fiscal for the amount of Switch’s sold.
When asked about the recent announcement of their downgraded target and here’s what Furukawa had to say, “This holiday season, we were able to release three major titles (Super Mario Party, Pokemon Let’s Go, Pikachu!/Pokemon Let’s Go, Eevee!, and Super Smash Bros Ultimate), and were able to grow our year-on-year hardware sales in every region. Yet despite having been able to sell fairly large large volume of hardware during the holiday season, it is true that we now do not anticipate the forecasted 12-month sales volume set at the beginning of this fiscal year.” He continued, “And from the viewpoint of our full-year unit sales forecast for this fiscal year, while we expected that releasing titles during the holiday season would help to increase sales, the year-on-year sales increase during the first half of the fiscal year (April to September) turned out not big enough, which also affected the revision of the unit forecast as we looked back now.”
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