The Switch OLED launched in October and it’s off to a “good start,” Nintendo has announced as part of its latest earnings briefing. The company did not announce a specific sales figure for the new console, but Nintendo said the good sales out of the gate demonstrate that people who might have purchased a Switch five years ago at launch are now looking for an upgrade.
“Motivations behind system purchases have diversified,” Nintendo said. “Some are buying a Nintendo Switch system for the first time, while others are buying a second one, and still others are replacing their existing system with a Nintendo Switch OLED model.”
Nintendo also said it has observed that when the Switch launched in 2017, it was common for there to be one Switch in a household, but now “more and more families now own multiple systems.” Nintendo’s goal is to sell a Switch to every member of a given household.
“We continue to strive to expand our install base to one Nintendo Switch per person,” Nintendo said. “We believe there is even further room for the Nintendo Switch install base to grow.”
Also in the report, Nintendo said the success of the Switch OLED might allow the company to achieve something it never has before. If the OLED model can continue to grow alongside sales of the Switch in general, Nintendo could achieve six straight years of growth in its hardware division–it’s never done this before in the company’s history.
Nintendo said it believes it can achieve this for three main reasons, the first is that the Switch is a unique system featuring three main modes of play–TV, tabletop, and handheld. The second is that, as mentioned above purchase patterns have shifted and individual members of a single home are buying a console instead of having just one for the whole family. And third, Nintendo said it will continue to deliver a “robust lineup” of evergreen games that people always want to buy (like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe), while also releasing new and exciting games all the time.
The Switch has seen a great deal of success over the past five years, and in total, Nintendo has sold nearly 93 million systems and 681 million games. The system might be difficult to find this holiday, however, as Nintendo recently said it’s unable to produce as many consoles as it originally envisioned due in part to the ongoing semiconductor shortage.
