Nintendo admits sales “below expectations”, as wait for Switch 2 continues

Nintendo has reported a huge drop in sales of its hardware and software, with Switch 1 console sales down 30.6 percent year-on-year for the nine months ending 31st December.

Switch 1 software sales also fell significantly – down 24.4 percent. In a statement, Nintendo blamed the scale of the drop on tough comparisons with 2023, and the launches of both The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Super Mario Bros Wonder.

Sales of the aging Switch 1 have been falling for years, meanwhile, but Nintendo’s latest results are worse than the company previously forecast. Alongside the impact of a poorer US dollar exchange rate, Switch 1’s performance has now forced Nintendo to lower its expectations again for the remainder of the financial year.

The company is now forecasting its net sales for the financial year ending on 31st March as 1.19tn yen (£6.16bn), down seven percent from its previous expectations, and its net profit as 270m yen (£1.39m), down 10 percent.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom. New releases included The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, which sold 3.91m copies – a good number, though predictably nowhere near the sales of either Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom.

Nintendo also launched Super Mario Party Jamboree, which sold an impressive 6.17m copies.

And, of course, the unstoppable Mario Kart 8 Deluxe continued to sell well. It shifted another 5.38m copies over the last nine months of 2024, and now stands at a whopping 67.35m copies sold.

Switch 1 now stands at 150.86m consoles sold to date, just shy of the Nintendo DS’s lifetime total of 154m. While Nintendo should squeak past that, its less certain the console can reach the record 160m sales of PlayStation 2.

How many more units can Switch 1 sell? Nintendo’s software line-up currently looks slim, with Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition due in March, before Metroid Prime 4, which feels likely to be a Switch 2 cross-gen game, later this year.

Switch 1 still has one final Pokémon game up its sleeve, Pokémon Legends Z-A, expected to arrive this summer. But it’s now clear that Switch 2 can’t come soon enough. We’re next due an update from Nintendo – when presumably we’ll hear about Switch 2’s release date and price – in April.