As the Nintendo Switch nears its seventh year on sale, and with Switch 2 rumours growing ever louder, Nintendo of America boss Doug Bowser has spoken about why the console has maintained demand for so long and even enjoyed a boost in sales this year.
Nintendo sold 3.91 million Switch consoles in the June quarter, up 13.9% on the year. While Switch’s sales peak has clearly passed, this recent rise, boosted by the phenomenal success of the Super Mario Bros. Movie and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, has shown Nintendo has maintained demand for its six-and-a-half year old console.
In an interview with IGN at the recent Nintendo Live event in Seattle, Bowser said he’d “stopped counting years” when it comes to the life of the Switch. “And the reason is, first of all, we talked about this when we launched Nintendo Switch,” he said, “we really did believe this was a very, very differentiated model and device that people could play at home, like a home console, take on the go, like a handheld, and there’s a variety of different gameplay experiences somewhere in between. And so it’s maintained that point of differentiation, quite honestly, over the years quite nicely.
“The other way I look at this is every year there are millions of households that have children reaching the age of six or seven or eight, and they’re making choices about how they want to engage their family in gaming and what platform they want to bring their family in with. And I really believe Nintendo positions itself very well because of that versatility of the device and of equal importance.”
Bowser also pointed to Nintendo’s impressive first-party output, which includes the upcoming co-op focused 2D platformer Super Mario Bros. Wonder. “And so I think, as a result, you can really think about every year there being an opportunity, if you will, to regenerate and bring new players into gaming, and then leveraging things like the movie or maybe an experience they had at Super Nintendo World in Universal Studios,” Bowser said. “I think there’s this opportunity to keep building every year.”
Nintendo is reportedly preparing to release its next console during the second half of 2024. This comes despite an overall decline in Switch sales. The console sold close to 18 million units in Nintendo’s last financial year, down from 23 million sold the year before and 28 million the year before that. Nintendo isn’t looking to rush a new console out to tackle this decline though, despite forecasting another drop for the coming year.
“Sustaining the Switch’s sales momentum will be difficult in its seventh year,” Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa admitted in May. “Our goal of selling 15 million units this fiscal year is a bit of a stretch, but we will do our best to bolster demand going into the holiday season so that we can achieve the goal.”
Meanwhile, Nintendo has announced a raft of games for Switch due out between now and the end of its fiscal year. These include Detective Pikachu Returns, the aforementioned Super Mario Bros. Wonder, WarioWare: Move It!, a Super Mario RPG remake, Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet DLC, a visually enhanced version of Nintendo 3DS game Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon, and an untitled Princess Peach game. Nintendo still lists the MIA Metroid Prime 4 as a Nintendo Switch game.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.