A lot has been said about the “disappointing” Switch 2 holiday sales in certain markets. It might surprise you that Nintendo themselves had anticipated this. As shown in pierre485’s infograph below, Nintendo forecasted to sell 8.64M units of NS2 in the 3rd and 4th quarters post launch. That is lower than NS1’s 10.16M units in the same period.
Furukawa said this in the Q&A session last May: “Nintendo Switch 2 is priced relatively high compared to Nintendo Switch, so we recognize that there are corresponding challenges to early adoption.” He reiterated it later in the same session: “But the Nintendo Switch 2 hardware is priced relatively high compared to Nintendo Switch, so even if there is momentum around the launch, we know it will not be easy to keep that momentum going over the long term through the holiday season and beyond.”
So it seems that despite a fast start (most likely due to pent-up demands after an 8 year gen), Nintendo management correctly projected a slower sales velocity than NS1 into the holiday season. And as such, I expect them to have a software lineup planned for 2026 to pick up the momentum again.
[Originally posted on 2026-01-12 Pacific Time]
