What year are we on of people saying this exact same thing again?
Shuntaro Furukawa, president of Nintendo: "Switch is just in the middle of its lifecycle and the momentum going into this year is good. The Switch is ready to break a pattern of our past consoles that saw momentum weakening in their sixth year on the market and grow further".
It's a money printing machine. It officially surpassed the PS4 recently. You aren't getting a successor yet. Nobody gives a shit about the weak hardware when Animal Crossing sells 40 million copies.
Tbf, I don't think that quote is from 2022. The talking point from Nintendo that Switch is only in the mid-point of it's lifecycle was 2020/2021, and it's just that, a talking point. From their angle, they are in absolutely no rush to put out new hardware. They want to extract every dollar they possibly can from the Switch.
But also, Nintendo's just said it again themselves this week: the OLED has a smaller profit margin than OG Switch, and it retails for $349 in the US. What would a successor need to be priced at for them to be able to make a profit on each unit sold if they released one this year, or even next? $399? I'm thinking there's a ceiling that Nintendo really can't go over for their machines to remain mass-market friendly. I don't think any new machine they could sell to us this year for $399 would be worth the investment vs what we get for the Switch we already have. I think they're taking more time to wait for material costs to come down, so when they do release a successor, they can hit that $399 price point, and it actually delivers enough performance improvement that we all see the value in buying one.
I think holiday 2024 or early 2025 is more realistic. And if Switch sales nosedive this holiday or early next year, they could release a GameCube Mini or N64 Mini to get their hardware business through the console transition period. And to be clear, sales are not likely to nosedive, they'll just be at a point, likely by this fall, where Lite and OG models get their first official price drop. Or they could do a Switch Micro, or a GBA-style mini Switch to launch alongside GBA being added to NSO.
They're in a very, very good position, in that, the system is 7 years old in March, and they've never had to do a price drop, ever. That is unheard of in the history of consoles. And they could also launch the Player's Choice/ Nintendo Selects line for games over 2-3 years old, and breathe new life into older/forgotten games like ARMS, 1-2 Switch, Super Mario Party, Clubhouse Games, Yoshi Crafted Wolr,d etc. They've got so many things they can do to stem the loss of slowing end-of-life console sales, before they truly need a successor.
sleeping .. no thanks
