Image Courtesy: bgr.com |
So Nintendo Switch is a popular device, so it's no surprise that it's popular. This is a four-year-old device that has sold over 90 million units. That's a lot of devices. In their most recent fiscal year, from March 2020 to March 2021, they sold nearly 29 million units of the Nintendo Switch. However, you should keep in mind that this is a four-year-old device. Over the last four years, almost 90 million units have been sold, with nearly 29 million units sold in the most recent year. So, if Nintendo were to release a new product, such as a new Nintendo Switch Pro or whatever they want to call it, they would require an absurdly large number of chips, and fabricating a new chip for this new product would be unfeasible right now. If you think about how tough it was to get a graphics card over the last year, consider how difficult it would be to get a switch. It would be like a scalper's dream to have Nintendo switches that could be sold for a thousand dollars. But the larger point we want to make is the switch's performance during the last year. For whatever reason, Nintendo switches have suddenly surged in popularity during the pandemic. Normally, in the fourth year of a device, you don't see a huge increase in sales, right? It's like the first two or three years of any console like this, it does well, then there's this natural decline, but on year four of the Nintendo Switch, it blew up the pandemic and like the desire for gaming just exploded, and they're writing this sweet wave right now, and to introduce new hardware at the height of their popularity would be the dumbest thing they could do. Any business-minded person would say, "Nintendo, don't put out new hardware right now with a more powerful chip, you only want to do that when your brand is on the decline and people aren't as interested in the console, that's when you want to do that, that's when everyone does it, not right now when they were at the height of their popularity when they sold 29 million copies in their fourth year. To put that number in context, I believe the PlayStation 5 will sell 11 to 12 million units in its first year, which will be the most popular year for the PlayStation 5. Similarly, the Xbox is expected to sell eight to nine million copies. What we're trying to say is that if Nintendo were to say, "Hey, let's break that mentum, let's just cut our sales and put out new hardware to appease the enthusiasts," what would that achieve for them? If anything, we'd go so far as to say that even if they did have something planned, let's say they had hardware lined up and the supply chain ready to go pull the plug on that project, what would that achieve for them? You want to ride this for as long as you can because if they sold 29 million units in year four, number one, they don't need new hardware, and number two, people are clearly satisfied with the existing hardware like the numbers speak for themselves, and you know what Nintendo's the king of doing just enough, as the bare minimum to keep people happy and to make a ton of money in the process.
So that's our take on Nintendo's new OLED switch; we think it's cool, just as we think an OLED panel on a portable device is cool, but the truth is they don't need new processors right now.
Stay tuned to CERadar for more such content.
0 Comments