Shuntaro Furukawa reflects on the life cycle of the current hybrid platform, which he currently considers in the middle of his commercial journey.
Nintendo believes that they can continue working on extending the life of Nintendo Switch in the market. Shuntaro Furukawa, president of the company, has reflected in Nikkei on the extraordinary success of the console, whose rate of growth is out of the ordinary, and that also raises making decisions outside the norm. Both Wii and Nintendo DS reached their peak in their fourth year; From there, the annual sales trend was gradually downward, but with Nintendo Switch the forecasts point to a longer-lived platform in time, and they will work to make it so.
“I always say that Nintendo Switch is roughly in the middle of its life cycle,” he begins by saying. Statements that he has made not only on the occasion of the presentation of the financial results of the last quarter, the one ended on December 31, 2020, but also referred to the equator in the useful life of Switch in 2020. “We are able to offer a great variety of different games because Switch is both a home and portable console, but there is much we can continue to do in the coming years, “he says.
Pair of Nintendo Switch Joy-Con connected to a Joy-Con Grip.
“We have to keep in mind that the base console will continue to expand, as well as the types of games that we have already released for the system.” To date, Nintendo Switch has sold 79.87 million units, a rate higher than the Wii (101 million in its entire life) at the same time, after 46 months on the market.
The company expects to close this fiscal year on March 31 with a total of 26 million units, which would be a historical record for the company. If Nintendo ships another 20 million in fiscal year 2021/22, which will end on March 31, 2022, they will have reached that date already ahead of the accumulated sales of Wii.
Evolution of sales of Wii (blue) and Nintendo Switch (green).
Nintendo is “always doing technical and market Reviews”
One way or another, Nintendo plans to continue cultivating the platform’s implantation in major markets. The Nintendo Switch family consists, to date, of the standard model with detachable Joy-Con and hybrid capacity (TV and portable), and Nintendo Switch Lite, a solely portable solution with a lower price. If they will publish new redesigns or models is something that is unknown, but when asked in this regard, they affirm that they do not have the presentation of new hardware in their immediate plans.
Furukawa says in that same interview that “we are always doing technical and market Reviews”, whether or not they are expecting to publish a new generation of consoles. It also makes it clear that the hardware and software team are always working in constant communication as they are in the same building.
Source | Nikkei (via Nintendo Everything)
