Nintendo Approaches the End of the Switch Lifecycle

When Japanese gaming giant Nintendo reported results for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2024 on Tuesday, the company's president Shuntaro Furukawa officially confirmed that the successor to its hugely popular Nintendo Switch console is just around the corner. "We will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year," Furukawa said, setting the deadline for a Switch 2 announcement to March 31, 2025. Nintendo fans will need some patience, however, as he made clear that there would be no mention of the new console at the company's upcoming Nintendo Direct event in June.

Following the disastrous spell of the Wii U, which ended in its early retirement, Nintendo took a huge gamble with its follow-up console. Once again, the company didn't try to copy the successful recipe of Microsoft's Xbox or Sony's PlayStation business, but went with its own approach instead. Little more than seven years after the Switch's release in March 2017, it can safely be said that the gamble to make it a hybrid between home and handheld console paid off. 

Not only was the Switch a return to form after the Wii U disaster, but it even ended up overtaking the Wii as Nintendo's most successful home console ever in terms of sales. With more than 140 million units sold, the Switch is not only Nintendo's greatest hit, but also the second most successful console of all time, trailing only the PlayStation 2, of which Sony sold 155 million units over its lifetime.

And while the Switch still has some life left in it, the end of its lifecycle is now officially on the horizon. As the following chart shows, every console cycles comes to an end eventually, and none of Nintendo's previous consoles have managed to turn things back around once sales had started to decline. For the fiscal year ending March 31, 2025, Nintendo expects to sell 13.5 million Switch consoles, which would bring it into touching distance of the PlayStation 2 record.