Nintendo President Explains Why The 20 Million Units Forecast For The Switch Was Missed

Nintendo ended up missing its original, ambitious forecast for selling 20 million units of the Nintendo Switch this fiscal year. Even though the Switch is selling very well, it won’t meet that target, and Nintendo has now downgraded its forecast to 17 million units.

There have been a lot of theories on why the forecast was missed, with some analysts pointing to the weaker than expected first half of the year as a reason for why it may have happened. However, now Nintendo’s President Shuntaro Furukawa himself has chipped in as to why Nintendo couldn’t meet their own targets.

“As we look back so far (for this fiscal year), we now evaluate that our efforts to fully convey the appeal of Nintendo Switch hardware and software to the number of new consumers we originally hoped to reach were insufficient,” Furukawa said, speaking during a Q&A session

“And from the viewpoint of our full-year unit sales forecast for this fiscal year, while we expected that releasing titles during the holiday season would help to increase sales, the year-on-year sales increase during the first half of the fiscal year (April to September) turned out not big enough, which also affected the revision of the unit forecast as we looked back now.”

That said, this year should hopefully end up going better for Nintendo. They have multiple exciting games announced coming to the system, and rumors as well as official confirmations have given us reason to believe that many unannounced games may also be coming out this year. Hopefully, this is the kind of cadence of game releases Nintendo can manage going forward, and not have a relatively dry year like 2018 again.