Switch 2 Sales Fall 41% as Price Hikes Bite Into Nintendo's Year

Nintendo sold 2.67 million Switch 2 consoles between July and September, a 41% drop against the same quarter last year. The figure, reported by CNBC, landed almost exactly where Kantan Games CEO Serkan Toto said it would when he called the decline at the start of June.

The cause is straightforward. During the quarter running from July 1 to September 30, Nintendo raised Switch 2 prices in the United States, Canada and Japan, following an earlier hike in Japan this year. Toto, whose firm tracks and analyzes the Japanese game industry, predicted the increase would suppress sales. It did. Nintendo, for its part, is telling investors it will still hit its forecast of 16.5 million units sold by March 31, 2027, the close of Japan's current fiscal year.

Can software carry the hardware?

That forecast now rests heavily on games, and here Nintendo's cupboard looks thin. Toto put it bluntly: "Nintendo's only real blockbuster this fiscal year is the Ocarina of Time remake. It's not enough to make investors happy, especially after the device is now as expensive as it is."

The remake in question releases tomorrow, and early reception has been unkind. Fans have criticized its visuals as uncanny and overly photorealistic, a departure from the original art style many expected to be preserved with updated audiovisuals. The package appears thin on additions beyond the original game — notably, it omits Master Quest, the harder variant veterans were anticipating.

The verdict forming among players is unflattering: a reskin rather than a release worthy of the hype. If that view holds after launch, the remake may fail to drive the Switch 2 sales Nintendo is counting on. The coming weeks will show whether the pessimism was earned.

A chip supplier walks away

Nintendo's problems are not confined to pricing and software. Macronix, one of the company's ROM chip manufacturers, has recently stopped ROM chip production entirely, redirecting its capacity toward NOR and NAND flash chips for AI data centers. Macronix is also betting on current memory price hikes for short-term gain. In plain terms, one supplier decided Nintendo's legacy cartridges matter less than the AI memory boom. That decision removes a piece of Nintendo's supply chain at the worst possible moment.

The pressure on Nintendo is therefore twofold. Investors want more big releases to move hardware at the new, higher price, and the component side has grown less dependable. The pipeline offers some relief, but not soon: new Pokémon games are planned for 2027. As for the speculation that Nintendo might finally accept Palworld onto its platform — that remains fan wishful thinking rather than company policy.

What happens next

Nintendo's task for the rest of the fiscal year is arithmetic more than strategy. It must convince buyers that a pricier console is worth it with a lineup whose headline title arrives tomorrow amid skepticism, while its 16.5 million-unit forecast stays publicly intact. If the Ocarina of Time remake underperforms and no surprise hits fill the gap, that forecast — and investor patience — will come under real strain.