The Nintendo Switch is expected to sell 130 million units through to 2022, if Swiss multinational financial services company, Credit Suisse, is to be believed.
The Swiss holding company recently increased its Nintendo Switch sales forecast by roughly 85% as it believes that sales for Nintendo’s new platform more closely resemble handheld sales instead of traditional console sales. Down below you’ll read what the company’s analyst, Keiichi Yoneshima, said:
As Nintendo’s Switch is a unique game platform for use as either a console or handheld, there was initially some uncertainty over whether its sales cycle would more closely resemble that of a console or handheld. Although the Switch is currently categorized as more of a console, we expect it to sell like a handheld. Many users are in fact using the Switch as a portable according to a Famitsu survey of users. We previously projected a sales peak at about three years after launch (i.e., in FY3/19) on the assumption of a console-like sales cycle. Now that the Switch looks more likely to sell like a handheld, we update our sales forecast to reflect a longer sales cycle. We now expect the Switch to achieve peak sales about five years after launch (i.e., around FY3/20–21) like a typical handheld game device. We also raise our peak-year sales forecast from 25mn to 31mn units.
The Swiss multinational initially expected the Switch to sell 70 million units through 2022.
Nintendo released the Switch back in March of this year and the platform has been extremely well ever since. The hybrid console was the best selling platform in the US for the past few months, thereby beating Sony’s PlayStation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox One.
