Nintendo has set a lofty goal for itself but will it be able to follow through?
Nintendo has set it’s goal for the Switch at 10 million units of sale by may 31st, 2018. Within the first month Switch sales surpassed Nintendo's 740,000 units sold estimate, and instead sold 2.74 million units, generating $822 million in worldwide sales.
In Nintendo’s Fiscal Year Briefing Report released at the end of March, they state that they are planning to ship 12.7 million copies by March of 2018.
However, with how fast the Switch is selling, and Nintendo’s history of shortages - most notably the recent NES classic and in the past instances like the Wii, a lot of gamers are skeptical that Nintendo can follow through on this promise, and I mean A LOT.
Nintendo’s lack of hardware was even an issue during the NES’s original release back in the 80’s, when Super Mario Bros 2 was in high demand but low stock.
Because of this apparent pattern in lack of availability, people are constantly questioning if the shortages are deliberate or accidental. Despite what people are saying however, it’s been reported numerous times that Nintendo has upped the production rates of the Switch in order to meet the market demans of folks today and in an article by ars technica Nintendo’s Senior Director of Coporate Communications Charlie Scibetta comes forward to address the issue, stating that the shortage upon initial release was unintentional and purely due to an underestimation of how popular the Switch would be.
With Nintendo doing everything it can to meet consumer demands, it’s hard to support the theory that they’re deliberately shorting us on their consoles. Many reddit users/threads blame scalpers and collectors for buying up multiple consoles and trying to resell them for an inflated price.
Others are blaming Apple since many of the parts used in production for the Switch are also used in Apple phones and computers. Toshiba says that their NAND chips are in high demand, particularly from Apple, which makes it hard for other companies to get ahold of them.
Nintendo’s CEO Reggie Fils-Aime has spoken openly with IGN about the plans to ramp up productions as soon as possible so that “[whoever] wants a nintendo Switch can find a nintendo switch.” This which was promptly followed with Fils-Aime saying “I’m not going to tell you when we’ll get there, but our goal is to improve our supply chain.” So while we can count on seeing more and more Switch consoles, we can also probably count on the shortages continuing as well.
With all of this in mind, from the shortage of parts to scalpers, to the CEO not wanting to promise when we’ll be able to easily purchase a Switch to nintendo’s past history of underestimating and understocking all the way down to the fact that demand for the product is constantly increasing it makes it hard to believe that these shortages will ever end.
