/PRCWT/Guangzhou, May 10, 2023——Nintendo has a big sales goal for the Switch for the remainder of 2023, and the whole next year in general. In its latest earnings report, company President Shuntaro Furukawa stated that Nintendo’s goal for the next year is to try and sell 15 million Switch consoles.
That may not seem like a stretch compared to some of Nintendo’s past annual sales numbers. But that’s just it. Sales for the Switch have been declining and Furukawa believes that hitting 15 million units sold for the year of 2023 will be tough to do. Nintendo of course will certainly aim to meet this number. And the company has a plan.
As Furukawa points out during the earnings call, “sustaining Switch sales in the console’s seventh year will be difficult.” So to overcome this hurdle, Nintendo says it wants to try and put several Switch consoles in every single home. Perhaps even “one Switch for every person.” That seems like a silly prospect to some. But you might be surprised at the amount of people with larger households that own more than one Switch already. Offering three different models of the Switch could certainly help the company achieve this goal of several per home.
A Switch OLED for the main home console use as well as travel for adults, and Switch Lite’s for the kids. Or for those who don’t have kids, Nintendo could easily target these consumers with special edition Switch releases. Like the recently released Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom model that launched on April 28.
Nintendo expected Switch sales to slow down in 2023
More precisely, the company said last year that it expects sales for the Switch to continue slowing down as they have been for the last two years.
The company’s 2021 sales of 23 million units shrunk to 18 million for 2022. And now Nintendo suspects it may have trouble hitting 15 million. So the company is aware of this continued trend and is planning accordingly. Leading to its plan to try and sell additional consoles to the same households.
It’s also quite likely that this week’s release of the Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will convince some people to pick up the console for the first time, or perhaps buy another if multiple people in the home want to play it simultaneously. Game sales are likely to help offset things a little as well.
