Mainstream Media HATES Nintendo Switch 2 is Soaring!

All right, folks. We got a little bit of a different video for you today. First off, I'll just remind you yeah, we're giving away a Switch too. We've been doing it all summer. Uh the giveaway should be ending, I believe, in September. I Look, guys. I'll be I'll be honest. It might be extended an extra month past what I planned. I planned to do it uh up to September 1st, but then I realized I got the PAX West trip coming up. So, we'll probably extend it to the end of September, but no later than that. So, we'll draw the winner on October, I think October 1st, so we can get it to the winner, obviously, for the holiday season. We want to make sure uh that that new Switch 2 owner, or whoever is winning it, giving it to a family member, whatever they do, that they have it and they can make any holiday plans they wish around that item. Um you can enter through the link down in the pinned comment or the description. The only requirement to enter is to be subscribed to the channel. All right. Today, we're going to talk about the Nintendo Switch 2 and the undeniable success it is having at the moment. Uh there is a lot of chatter on the internet from various news outlets, uh YouTubers, and others that have been trying to downplay Nintendo's success for a long time. We actually, last night, on a live stream, went over this really embarrassing, and I have to call it embarrassing, article uh {slash} video over on IGN, where it talked about, you know, has Nintendo lost its soul? And Look, I there's no other way to state what that video and article is other than rage-baiting to Nintendo fans and really anybody who is in the know with the history of Nintendo, who's grown up in this industry. Hell, you don't even have to be like big Nintendo fans. You just have to be aware of things as you grew up in the industry to understand how bad that article is. It's not It's one thing that for the author to like think Nintendo has lost its soul, explain what the soul is, and then, you know, conclude that, you know, that the in their opinion, it's lost it. But, the way they go over the history of Nintendo is so factually inaccurate. They're They're misunderstandings of what gaming was like in the '90s and and all sorts of stuff. It's embarrassing, right? But, that's just an opinion piece. What does that have to do overall with the success of Switch 2? Well, IGN also has been reporting on Nintendo's latest financials and using headlines to indicate that Switch 2 is slowing down, Switch 2 is tanking. Honestly, it's at a point where some people were wondering if IGN hate to bring his name up, but hired a content creator Nintendine who I guess if you guys don't know who he is, I don't really blame you. He does exist in my sphere of covering Nintendo, but obviously in a severely negative way. I'm actually going to bring up his channel right now just to kind of show you what I mean by like just spinning everything Nintendo does into the negative here. So, as I go over to his channel and we'll go to his videos. You'll see like hey, Nintendo Switch 2 has significantly slower software sales which is really interesting. The sales are actually aren't that far behind the Nintendo Switch in the same time period and that is without a mainline Splatoon game, without Mario, and without Zelda and despite that they're actually not that far behind in software sales. You also see oh look, another coverage of the sales is saying that Star Fox and Yoshi flopped apparently even though Nintendo said that they're actually moving well and highly likely going to become million sellers by the time the next time comes around. These are not IPs that are major sellers for Nintendo. So, them even flirting with a million is pretty good and I think they will pass it and who knows, there could be some evergreen sales there. You know, obviously you see like hey, nobody wants the Switch the slow sales. What's really interesting about someone like this and this isn't really about them, it's it's more so about the mainstream media and their coverage. It just the mainstream media is getting to the point that they're starting to sound like Nintendine. It doesn't really line up with reality and [snorts] the Nintendo Switch 2 is actually like I I didn't bother to do like the full research to see if it's still like the fastest selling console of all time. I think that might technically be true but in terms of just talking about Nintendo, it's the fastest selling Nintendo system of all time so far. Is it going to maintain that pace for the lifetime of the platform? I don't believe so, but one thing I wanted to show you is like when we talk about sales momentum slowing down and how bad things are, Nintendo just had their second best Q1 of all time for an individual platform. What do I mean? Well, let's go look at the all-time best Q1 ever, which happened during COVID. So, during COVID, this was Nintendo's fiscal year of 2021 Q1. They sold 5.68 million units of hardware. That is the most they've ever sold in a Q1 for one system. You can even see that 166.6% increase over Q1 of the year prior. That was just 2.13 million. You can see 3.05 million of that was Switch. 2.62 million was Switch Lite. This predates the Switch OLED, which came out later that year. So, this is the best-selling Q1 in Nintendo history for one piece of hardware. Really, really impressive stuff. But, we all know COVID was causing major boosts in sales for everyone and sellouts everywhere, and Nintendo was just the best prepared and had the most stock. But, even they were selling out in 2020 and 2021 due to COVID. So, obviously, a massive increase in demand. You saw Animal Crossing, you know, obviously popping up, still selling an extra 10 million during that yada yada. Like, Animal Crossing was a really huge seller for them. All that stuff. So, that was a big boost during COVID. We know exactly why Switch performed that well, and we know why, obviously, uh the Switch 2 uh ended up uh or Switch 1 in this case ended up selling that well as well uh due to that. Now, when we go over to Switch 2, turns out this is the second best-selling ever Q1, and this is without COVID. This is without a game at the level of Animal Crossing, let alone exclusive to Switch 2, cuz there was a big game in that quarter, but the big game in that quarter was Tomodachi Life, which you could buy on Switch 1. So, we can't really give Switch 2 credit for the sales of that game, because there was already a massive install base. Now, Pokémon Pokkén was out, but again, launched before this quarter. Still ended up selling over a million last quarter. You're going to see right here. So, we see Nintendo Switch 2 having moved 3.82 million. That again, is the highest we had ever seen. Now, you do go back to obviously fiscal year 2026 Q1, and the big note about that, where you see the 5.82, that has to do with launch. Okay? So, when I talked about it being the second best ever Q1, this was in terms of total 3-month sales data. So, that's what I mean. You want to argue it's actually the third, cuz it's behind the Nintendo Switch 2's launch, fine. I'll bite. I'll give you that argument. But, again, that was a record launch. 3.82 million a year later, that's really, really damn impressive for that quarter. So, you want to go with the third best Q1 in Nintendo history? Uh by the way, this is across 13 platforms. Yeah, that's really, really impressive. You call it the second, you call it the third, whatever you want to call it, I'm counting the full 3 months all together, but obviously Switch 2's launch in June last year was incredible. Okay. So, to put even more perspective on this, obviously people are like, "Well, you know, that that can't be that impressive. You must be wrong, Nate. We got to go back and look at Nintendo's Q1 2018." Now, the way Nintendo's financial reports worked back then was a lot more text-based. Uh so, we're going to go to Newsweek who covered this, cuz they have the data in here. Uh I was digging through Nintendo's financial, I found the data, but it was really hard to read. I didn't like how it was presenting the data, uh even though it was there. So, we're just going to go here, um and we're going to see, according to Nintendo's financial reports, Switch sales saw a noticeable drop-off from April 1st to June 30th. This is 2018. So, this would be a similar time period um cuz it's the, you know, the following year for Switch, just like it's the following year for Switch 2. This is the exact same months, right? We're talking April to June, right? So, the exact same months, even though we're not time-aligned, right? We can go launch-aligned if you want, but we're we're going month-aligned in terms of being in the second year. Nintendo moved 1.88 million units down from 1.97 million a year ago. Okay. So, now you see that it more than doubled what Switch was doing at a very, very similar calendar month lineup from April to June the following year after launch. So, when you consider that, uh how in any light is Switch 2 anything other than an unmitigated success at the moment? Let alone, how can there be any arguments about how the momentum has died off? In fact, we can actually look at the momentum from a chart perspective, because there's a person who put it all together, and the momentum doesn't really look that crazy wild compared to anything else Nintendo has done other than the fact it's just doing it better. So, here are the quarters. This has the Wii U. This obviously doesn't have every Nintendo platform on here. It'd be a wild chart to put all 13, but Wii U, Nintendo GameCube, 3DS, GBA, Switch, Nintendo DS, Wii and Switch 2. Now, the most important part on here is GBA is on there cuz GBA was previously Nintendo's fastest kickoff starting selling system ever. Then, DS and Switch 2, which are two of the top three best-selling video game platforms of all time in terms of consoles, right? So, let's go ahead and look at this. You see Switch has been ahead of everything the whole time. So, you had the record launch, right? And then it just kept going up. That's really, really interesting. So, this is shipments in millions of units and this is quarters, okay? So, the first quarter all the platforms existed, Switch 2 had the best launch ever. Then you get to the second quarter of all the platforms, Switch 2 is still jumping up. Then you get to which by the way, Donkey Kong Bonanza started that quarter right in July of last year. All right, then you get to the third quarter and the fourth quarter. Okay, now we're getting to holiday periods where Switch 2 is clearly going to get a boost. The holiday periods for other ones were at different times. All right, fine. But then you go from that fourth quarter, which is actually Q1 of this year calendar-wise, where it looked like Look at Look at this drop-off in momentum, then you see the momentum picked back up. Now, obviously we have some external explanations for this. Nintendo is increasing the price of the system, so that led to a boost in sales, especially in Japan. I don't necessarily know if it was much for the rest of the world for that period, but it definitely was in Japan cuz the rest of the world's getting the increase later, right? There it hasn't even happened yet. It's happening next month. So, if anything, this month right now would be kind of the month that you might see a boost here in the United States as people try to panic, get this at the current price, especially when we've seen a couple places even put it on sale at 400 for a second. Uh, those sold out very quickly though. So, anyways, the point is that obviously the momentum looks like it actually increased. Um, and it doesn't really look like it's going to fall behind much. Uh, it's already almost uh, past the sixth quarter of GBA. So, Switch 2 is going to factually be still the number one seller after the next quarterly report. And then guys, that is literally going to deal with what? July, August, September. And then we're to the holiday period again for the seventh. So, it's very likely going to boost up ahead of the seventh and eighth. And then the question is right here when we see that huge boost in the ninth quarter cuz of this is holiday, this is post-holiday. You know, it'll still be ahead here and then we get through a holiday season with uh, with the the GBA, will the Switch 2 still be ahead of it at this point? I guess it just kind of depends how well it does down here cuz that could be a slower sales period. But the point is there's a very good chance that 12 quarters in Switch 2 might still be the fastest selling Nintendo platform ever. But even if it ends up falling a bit behind GBA, if it's ahead of DS and it's ahead of the Switch, which are very close here, that would still be like let's say it's in between here. This it's a little red dot it goes right here. That would still be really impressive. That puts it almost in line and slightly ahead of the two best selling systems in Nintendo history so far. Now, obviously if it falls behind, which is what I suspect at some point, I do not think Switch 2, just going to tell you guys right now, personally, I do not believe Switch 2 is going to ever pass the DS or the Switch. I do think it'll cross 100 million. I just don't think a COVID like event and other things are going to happen, you know, towards the mid to late of its life to end up boosting sales. I do not think it's going to end up hitting those high marks, but I do think it will be 100 million plus. Where it stops from there, will it beat PS4 at 118 million? I have no idea, but it's going to obviously, you know, probably be 100 million plus. I don't really see any way that doesn't happen unless the world comes to an end. The prices get so ridiculous the Switch 2 ends up costing $800 or something crazy like that. Game prices skyrocket and just everything just goes haywire and the whole industry crashes. Hey, you know what? Crazier things have happened. But a lot of things seem to be swinging Nintendo's way. And [snorts] what I mean by swinging Nintendo's way isn't just the price of the platform even after the increase ends up being like the cheapest platform on the market. It's also the fact that they have to consider other things like what Sony's doing. Sony's alienating a lot of people right now in terms of the canceling physical games. And while a lot of people think Sony's going to weather the storm and they're going to be fine cuz the majority of their customers maybe aren't physical buyers, what they are doing is driving some of the customers that are their physical buyers cuz they do have millions of them, they are actually shifting them a little bit over to Switch 2. A number of them I have seen on social media, which is a really terrible way to determine anything because again the internet's not a real place. Uh but we are seeing people that were previously hardcore Sony fans and have hundreds and hundreds and not thousands of physical Sony games now picking up a Switch 2 after not buying a Nintendo system for quite some time. Why? Because the ability to buy physical games matters that much to them. So that actually might end up in helping Nintendo kind of keep things going for the next couple years just in terms of hey, having this thing where the other companies are slipping up and doing things that are actually causing Nintendo to feel like a better, smarter purchase for some customers. Uh that is just a really interesting place to sit in. So as we sit back and and look at what is happening, it it's very hard to look at this. It's very hard to glance at the data and come to any other conclusion other than the Switch 2 is just doing insane things during a very, very difficult time to sell systems. Um we're in a crisis in this industry, guys. Console prices are getting out of hand and I don't blame Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo for any of it. I don't blame the uh ROG. You know, I don't blame any of these companies that are making systems right now. Any companies making hardware outside of Nvidia, they're you know, obviously the chip makers they they are a little bit involved in this cuz they're favoring AI, but yeah, we know what's going on. There's a massive DRAM shortage or sold out through 2027. There's a massive storage shortage happening. Now we're hearing circuit boards are going to start getting more expensive because they can't keep up. So we're just hearing this nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing other than prices are going to keep going up. And eventually it could price customers out. But I do think Nintendo is going to keep resisting trying to do massive price increases. I'm not saying they won't increase the price of Switch 2 in 2027. I do think there's a possibility we hit $550 in 2027 cuz things are only going to get worse. I do think that could happen. I also think Nintendo might hit a point where the sales of Switch 2 at the end of this fiscal year, they're at a certain point the software sales start to pick up in a way where Nintendo decides that eat those additional losses because the software sales are keeping the momentum so strong that if other like PlayStation 6 and Xbox Helix come out at prices that the market can't bear. Not prices that are unfair for what it costs to make. We're hearing right now things like the cost of goods. This is with zero profit margins. This is with no shipping or taxes applied. Just the pure cost to make the components that make a PlayStation 6. The rumors out there have it at $1,200. Just to make the components for the system. That's the bill of goods right now. That's not going to get better. That's only going to get worse and you can imagine it's probably very similar for Xbox Helix as well. So, if we're starting to see $1,000 cuz they will take a loss on the system. If we start to see $1,000 systems launching, I think that's going to be priced out a huge chunk of the market and suddenly makes Switch 2 maybe boost in sales even more as it is the most affordable modern day option. And third-parties are bringing their games over. We're getting Call of Duty this year, right? We just got 60 FPS in Madden, for crying out loud. Third-parties are starting to realize, "Hey, maybe we got to start shifting to Nintendo a bit because the future of this console market is looking scary as hell for pretty much every company that isn't them." That's very interesting. I'm not saying PlayStation 6 will be a failure, by the way. This is not a console war thing. I actually feel for Sony in terms of how they have to price things right now. I feel for all these companies cuz it's not their fault. Normally, it's easy to get mad at like these companies being greedy and all that. We can't even say that. They're all selling the systems for a loss. They're all just trying to navigate this very difficult marketplace. Yes, I'm not happy with the lies Sony is telling to get rid of physical games, but the truth of the matter is, yes, the you know, digital game sales are increasing while while physical sales are decreasing, especially for Sony. And look, they're trying to mitigate some of this stuff and go all digital. I don't like the decision. I think it's wrong. I think it's leaving a lot of customers behind, but I I I I get it. We all know the all-digital future is a thing. It sucks to see that first big domino fall, but it it it is what it is, guys. Like I'm not like super pissed at Sony about it. I'm just sad. The whole thing just makes me sad. Um but when it comes to what Nintendo's got going on, I keep looking at this and I just I don't get what these major media outlets are doing. It's like they're hitching their their their wagon to something that everyone's backlashing against and then trying to make Nintendo look bad. And I don't Look, Thunder Stash Gaming has his own theories about this if he ever wants to get out there but what's going on with mainstream gaming media and why they're like trying to put Nintendo down and pump up these other systems that are doing all these things that are pissing off even their own reader base. Like IGN's own reader base is getting really pissed off at how they're handling Sony versus Nintendo right now and then Xbox I mean like Xbox is just kind of floating out there right now. I I really really hope whatever Ash is trying to do here works out. I lots of obvious doubts that it will, but you know, I hope for the best. I want all these companies to be successful. I actually want to be able to own all these platforms. I want to play all the the I want to play. And I just I I want the industry to be healthy again, but I I understand a lot of this is not on them. It's not their fault. Um it also means that maybe I think personally, we shouldn't be trying to get a PS6 or an Xbox Helix out right I mean, Xbox I give Xbox a smidgen of an excuse because look, they've had a rough go of it regardless of anything before we even got to this point, so they got to try something. Sony, I I think, you know, they could probably rest on PS5 for longer and just push off PS6. That's what I would do at least until maybe this AI bubble pops if ever. And then if it looks like 2028, 2029 comes and it's just not at some point, okay, maybe you pull the trigger and you adjust hope that it works out. Uh but they're also having lots of issues getting games out on a timely pace. I mean, we had we don't have a single game from Naughty Dog this generation. We used to get multiple, and I understand game developments costing more. Uh gamer expectations are more. I I look, honestly, guys, the quality of games Naughty Dog has put on PS4. I They could have just make it make making stuff like that and no one be any wiser today. They don't keep having to go to the leading edge of everything. And I think the chase for that leading edge is what's causing a lot of problems with the game side of the triple-A industry, but that's a different conversation for another day. Today, I just wanted to show everyone that Nintendo Switch 2 is just crushing it. Um and there's not really any other way to interpret this data unless you're just trying to find a way to put down one of the only things going well in this industry right now. And I don't know why you'd want to do that. I don't really get it. Um I get I guess if you're one of those people like Dean that thinks Nintendo is like ruining the whole industry. I I don't know. Uh I guess maybe that's why you want it all to fail, but for me, uh I'm just going to go ahead and uh take my Ice Mountain water, enjoy a good uh sip over here, and uh enjoy playing video games, man. It's It's rough out there for all of us, but uh games are still fun to play. Let's not forget about why we're here. Might not be able to always afford them, but when we can, they're damn, damn fun. All right, guys. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I'll catch you guys in the next video.