In a month, the Nintendo Switch will celebrate its 5th anniversary and Nintendo has unveiled its results for the last quarter of 2021, and these are looking good. With more than 103.5 million units sold, Nintendo’s hybrid console has already surpassed the record set by the Wii and its 101.6 million units sold. By detailing the figures, we realize that the bulk of the sales were made with the classic Switch which counts 81.6 million copies sold, against 17.8 million for the Switch Lite and 4 million for the Switch OLED. The arrival of this latest model, with a larger screen and better display quality, will allow the Kyoto firm to extend the life of its machine by an easy 3 good years, without having to boost the hardware. . It is in Nintendo’s philosophy, not necessarily to run after technology, which is a reproach that is often made to the Japanese manufacturer which offers games that are always technologically late.
But what does it matter, with such a commercial success, how to stop at this kind of detail, especially when one remains at the top of the hardware + software charts throughout the year, with such insolence that one wonders how the competition manages to cash in on that. This is proof that the market for so-called physical consoles is not yet ready to switch to full dematerialized, something that Microsoft has started to undertake by focusing on its Xbox Game Pass rather than selling machines, the company American market lagging behind its Japanese competitors, Sony and Nintendo. The proliferation of takeovers of studios and publishers is proof that the battle will be fought through subscription services that are ever richer in content and more attractive in terms of price, a bit like the cinema making its transition (not without difficulty) to SVOD platforms. One like the other, physical or dematerialized, there will always be room to live together.
