With a Nintendo Switch 2 announcement looking imminent amongst intensifying hardware leaks and third-party mockups, veteran analyst and Circana games lead Mat Piscatella predicts the new console will sell 4.3 million units in the US by the end of 2025, assuming it launches in the first half of the year, despite supply constraints fueled by intense launch demand.
Piscatella shared a brief outline of his 2025 expectations in a Bluesky post, "seeing as how an announcement appears to be coming soon (but who knows)." The stipulation that the Switch 2 launches in the first half of 2025 leaves a bit of wiggle room for how many months it's in market this calendar year.
"Expecting to see hardware constraints for several months after a significant early demand surge," Piscatella said. "And units sold will, of course, be dependent upon manufacturing capabilities and will."
In a follow-up response, Piscatella clarified "supply constraints coinciding with/driven by initial demand boom. But this is just an assumption, I don't know anything about [manufacturing] resources being put to this thing."
"I still expect PlayStation 5 to rank 1st in overall hardware units sold in the US during the year," he concluded.
To put the timing on this forecast into context, we know for a fact that Nintendo will reveal the Switch 2, or whatever it's officially called, by the end of March, though that reveal may well come sooner. When the console will actually be released is less clear. The original Switch was announced in October 2016 and released in March 2017, so a Switch 2 launch in the first half of 2025 seems probable. Recent rumors point to an April launch at the earliest.
Piscatella previously told GamesRadar+ that, compared to PlayStation and Xbox in the console market, Nintendo runs its own race "to an extent," albeit perhaps "not as much as Nintendo themselves might believe."
"Its sales patterns are a little bit different, the way that consumers will buy Nintendo devices in conjunction with a PlayStation or an Xbox or a PC," he said, later adding that "you use the word supplemental and people think, 'Oh no, that's, like, secondary to you.' And that's not the case at all. But they do supplement a player's gaming life, right? Not in a subservient way or a second-level way. They could be the most-played device, but they're a device that's often owned with other types of gaming devices. Which is great, it offers that variety. [Where] they operate in and their sales curves are just different, and the factors that may be impacting PlayStation and Xbox might not be impacting Nintendo in the same way."
Piscatella described 2025's GTA 6 and Nintendo Switch 2 combo as almost unprecedented: "I don't remember a year like this where so much of what's going to happen is focused on just two products."
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