Nintendo Reveals Staggering First Year Switch 2 Sales Forecast
Forget about the pricing premium compared to the first-generation model (and even the upgraded OLED variant) or the inflated cost of first-party games, which is ballooning to $80 a pop. Also forget about all of the uncertainty surrounding tariffs. Despite any criticisms or challenges that may exist for the soon-to-be-released Switch 2 handheld, Nintendo expects to have a banner year in terms of sales, with Switch 2 matching and even slightly exceeding the Switch 1 in its debut year.
Nintendo shared its sales forecast as part of its latest earnings disclosure (for fiscal year ended March 2025), revealing that it anticipates selling a staggering 15 million units in the first year.
At the baseline MSRP of $449.99, that comes to around $6.75 billion in sales. The math is a little more complicated than that, as it needs to account for price variations in different territories and exchange rates. However, Nintendo's also offering a Switch 2 + Mario Kart World bundle for $499.99, so that really could be a conservative estimate of revenue.
On top of that, Nintendo is forecasting Switch 2 software unit sales (games, basically) to reach 45 million in the handheld console's first year. And of course Nintendo will continue to sell Switch 1 systems comprising the Switch, Switch OLED, and Switch Lite. Those will add another 4.5 million unit sales, plus 10.5 million software sales.
To put the Switch 2 sales forecast into context, Nintendo sold 14.87 million Switch 1 consoles during its debut year.
"Switch 2 will launch into a stronger position than its predecessor, with over 100 million active Switch users providing a strong foundation for adoption," George Jijiashvili, Omdia’s senior principal analyst, said in a statement to CNBC.
Nintendo's Switch 2 sales forecast (PDF, page 27) doesn't seem overly optimistic when you take into account how wildly popular the first-generation Switch has been. To date, Nintendo has sold more than 152 million Switch 1 consoles, putting it just 2 million units shy of the company's best-selling console of all time, the Nintendo DS (154.02 million units).
The writing is already on the wall, too. Switch 2 preorders in Japan via Nintendo's store lottery system were so high that Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa issued a lengthy apology for not being able to fulfill them all in one fell swoop.
"Even including the number of units for the second lottery sale, we cannot fulfill all of the applications we received. We deeply apologize for not being able to meet your expectations despite our advance preparations. In response to this demand, we are currently working on further strengthening our production system," Furukawa said (via X's translation tool).
According to Furukawa, around 2.2 million people in Japan signed up for the lotter.
