Nintendo Lowers Its Hardware Forecast As Switch Sales Slow To A Crawl | Nintendo Life

Still, 146 million ain't bad

Nintendo has released its six-month financial data for FY2025 Q1/Q2, revealing that the Switch family of systems has now topped a whopping 146.04 million units. The downside of this is that the console's momentum has undoubtedly slowed down, selling just 2.64 million more than the 143.42 reported in August this year (which, to be fair, is still pretty decent for a console of its age).

The decrease year-on-year is a rather startling 31%. As such, Nintendo has revised its hardware forecast for the remainder of the financial year, decreasing previous estimates by 1 million to land at 12.5 million.

Software has also been on a bit of a downward trend, with Nintendo shifting a total of 70.28 million units to mark a year-on-year decrease of 27.6%. Nintendo again points to the releases of both The Super Mario Bros. Movie and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in the previous year as significant factors regarding the sharp downward turn.

However, on a brighter note, Nintendo does also state that the release of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom along with its custom-themed Switch Lite hardware did cause a nice upward tick in sales in the second half of the six-month period, with the game itself selling a total of 2.58 million. That said, Nintendo has also modified its software forecast, decreasing this by 5 million units to a total of 160 million.

It's clear that the Nintendo Switch is nearing the end of its lifespan at this point. We know that the eventual successor will be revealed before the end of the financial year (March 2025), but we suspect that some investors will have some questions about why Nintendo has yet to lift the lid on the next generation of Nintendo hardware.

Still, the holiday season will no doubt provide a nice little boost to both hardware and software sales, so we'll see if Nintendo can hit its lofty goal of 12.5 million Switch sales before the end of March next year.

For the second week in a row...

Everything about the "Switch successor"

What are your thoughts on Nintendo's current performance with the Switch? It seems pretty par for the course given the console's age, but let us know with a comment down below.

[source nintendo.co.jp]