With the holiday season approaching and the company’s recent increase in its Switch sales forecast, Nintendo president Tatsumi Kimishima had more to share about expanding production structure in the company’s latest financial results briefing.
The first holiday season for Nintendo Switch will be here soon. Sales began for Nintendo Switch in March, which is not the usual sales season. Our challenge, as we head into the year’s end, will be in our ability to gain the support of a wide range of consumers.
We are expanding our production structure to meet domestic and overseas demand, which has exceeded our initial projections. We have worked hard to ensure that we can provide as many consoles as possible. There was an announcement yesterday that we will revise our hardware sales projections for this fiscal year to 14 million units.
The ongoing lack of Nintendo Switch hardware on shelves in domestic and overseas markets means that our consumers, eager to play the software that has already been released, are not yet fully able to acquire the hardware. We are working to ensure that these consumers are able to get hardware, moving forward. We therefore believe that already-released titles offer big opportunities for us during this upcoming holiday season and beyond, and will support a long tail for hardware sales.
This winter, there will be a second major release of paid downloadable content for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, as well as the release of amiibo for the Four Heroes, as shown on this slide. There will also be a new packaged version for Snipperclips: Cut It Out, Together!, which has been only available as a download to date, that includes new stages and features. The ongoing free updates for ARMS and Splatoon 2 are part of our commitment to ensure consumers will keep playing, even for just one title. These efforts will generate buzz for released titles as well, and we believe it will help convince new consumers to make purchases.
In addition, December will also see the worldwide release of a new Nintendo title: Xenoblade Chronicles 2
