Nintendo today released its fiscal year statistics for the year ending March 31, 2023, revealing a decline in Nintendo Switch sales and dropping hints that new hardware won’t be released until April 2024.
Switch sales totaled 125.62 million units as of 31 March 2023. According to company executives, Nintendo said that hardware sales fell 22.1% year-on-year to 17.97 million units, falling short of its original sales target of 21 million units (later revised to 18 million units). They added that a shortage of semiconductors and other components hampered production. In the fiscal year ending March 2024, Nintendo expects to sell 15 million Switch gaming systems, representing a 16.5% decline in sales and the start of the Switch’s seventh year on the market.
“Nintendo Switch has been on the market for seven years, and it will be increasingly difficult to maintain the previous sales momentum, but our goal is to maximize sales by enabling more consumers to play Switch for a long time,” Nintendo said in a press release.
Shuntaro Furukawa, president of Nintendo, reportedly remarked during a conference call following the release of the financial report that the company is not entirely convinced it can meet its next target of 15 million units due to sluggish console sales. Furthermore, according to Furukawa, Nintendo’s annual plan doesn’t include any new or improved hardware, so that new Switch models won’t be released until the second quarter of 2019.
Furukawa predicts that maintaining the Switch’s sales momentum in its seventh year will be challenging. “It may be a stretch for us to sell 15 million consoles this year. But to do that, we’ll do everything we can to increase demand during the holiday season,” he said.
By surpassing the Wii’s record of 101.63 million unit sales, the Switch has already been certified as the best-selling Nintendo system of all time in 2017. However, it is still well below the 154.02 million units sold by the Nintendo DS. Among non-Nintendo consoles, only the PlayStation 2 (155 million units) outsold the Switch.