Sales of the Nintendo Switch 2 gaming console will begin only on June 5, but the company has already started accepting pre-orders. And the quota was exhausted quite quickly, even taking into account the price increase to $450 in the US and $350 in the manufacturer’s native Japan. The number of people wishing to buy the new product exceeded the preliminary size of the debut batch, and now Nintendo hopes to increase the volume of console production.
Image source: Nintendo
By midweek, it became known, as Bloomberg notes, that the site Nintendo launched specifically to accept pre-orders for Switch 2 in Japan had already received 2.2 million applications. This significantly exceeds the company’s ability to supply the first customers with the new console, so Nintendo was forced to increase the number of orders for its release. With the current ratio of consoles available for sale and those willing to buy them, the company would not be able to satisfy all the demand in Japan.
Analysts assumed that Nintendo would be able to prepare 6 to 8 million Switch 2 game consoles by early June. Considering that Japan accounts for about a third of Nintendo users, demand on a global market scale could reach 6.6 million consoles. By the way, the pre-orders for Switch 2 that began yesterday in American retail have already led to stores stopping to process them due to the exhaustion of the available quota. As you know, after some hesitation, Nintendo decided to leave the recommended price of Switch 2 for American retail at $450. Judging by the results of the first days of pre-orders, the increase in the cost of the console by one and a half times compared to its predecessor does not particularly stop those wishing to buy it.
According to analysts at Toyo Securities, up to 800,000 Switch 2 consoles, or even a million units, could be sold in Japan in the first week of sales. Worldwide, the new product could sell 5 million units in the first week of sales in June. This would indicate very high popularity. The shortage has already led to some stores in Japan offering to pre-order Switch 2 at a price of about $630 per unit.
As Bloomberg reports, citing eyewitnesses, a queue for pre-orders for Switch 2 began to form at the GameStop store in New York early in the morning, four hours before the store opened. By that time, a notice was posted on the store doors stating that 125 Switch 2 units would be available for order, and orders for their purchase were placed on a first-come, first-served basis. In stores of this chain in the US, it was possible to pre-order Switch 2 with a discount of $175, provided that a previous-generation console was traded in.