The Nintendo Switch has been a great commercial and critical hit for the Japanese gaming giant, especially after the colossal failure of the Wii U. The Nintendo Switch released way back in 2017, and between two mid-life hardware refreshes and the release of PS5 and Xbox Series X/S – fans have wondered again and again about when the successor to the Switch will finally release?
Ampere analyst Piers Harding-Rolls (speaking via Gamesindustry.biz) has estimated that the current year should once again be commercial success thanks to the recent release of the OLED model (as well as exclusives like Pokemon Legends: Arceus and the sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild) and as a result, sell around 21 million units.
He also talked about how the team has a successor to the Switch slated to release in 2024, and as such, a Switch Pro isn’t the most viable of options from a business standpoint. Of course, it needs to be mentioned that these are educated guesses, and we have yet to get an official confirmation from Nintendo on the matter.
“I’m currently expecting the console market year-on-year performance to be quite flat in 2022 as Switch sales decline and we come off what has been an amazing couple of years for console gaming. Even so, Nintendo Switch family of devices will once again be the best-selling consoles in 2022 at around 21 million sold to consumers, aided by the release of Switch OLED. I’m not expecting a Switch Pro in 2022. We have a next-gen Nintendo console in our forecasts for late 2024, so I’m not convinced a ‘Pro’ model is going to appear at all,” he said.
Nintendo Switch has sold over 90 million units in its lifecycle, and it has been reported that at least 5 million of those sales were from Japan alone over the past year, where its competition like the PS5 could only sell 1 million. To read more on that, click through here.