Nintendo Switch 2 launches globally with shortages expected
Nintendo's Switch 2 launched on Thursday and is widely expected to be in short supply globally amid pent-up demand for the more powerful next-generation gaming device.
'The level of demand seems to be sky-high,' said Serkan Toto, founder of the Kantan Games consultancy.
The Switch launched in 2017 and followed the underperforming Wii U. The home-portable device became a juggernaut with games including two Legend of Zelda titles and COVID-19 pandemic breakout hit Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
The Switch 2 bears many similarities with its predecessor but offers a larger screen and improved graphics and debuts with titles including Mario Kart World.
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'The much larger audience of Switch users should translate to stronger adoption in the opening part of its lifecycle,' said Piers Harding-Rolls, an analyst at Ampere Analysis.
'Nintendo is better prepared this time around' to deal with the high demand, he said.
The launch of the $499.99 Switch 2 is a test of Nintendo's supply chain management during US President Donald Trump's trade war.
Nintendo last month forecast sales of 15 million Switch 2 units during the current financial year.
President Shuntaro Furukawa said Nintendo will strengthen production capacity to respond to strong demand and focus on sales promotion in an effort to exceed the forecast.
The company, which is known for conservative forecasts, also expects to sell 4.5 million Switch units.
Nintendo said it received 2.2 million applications for its Switch 2 sales lottery on its My Nintendo Store in Japan. Pre-orders at Target sold out in less than two hours.
'You are looking at weeks or months until you can walk into a store and buy a Switch 2,' said Toto of Kantan Games.
Investor expectations for the new device are similarly lofty.
Nintendo's shares are trading near highs and have gained almost 30 per cent this year.
Concerns include whether momentum for the Switch 2 will be sustained after hardcore gamers have upgraded.
'The volume of first-party games on offer at launch isn't as strong as it could be, so some more casual users may wait and see how the games available build over the next one to two years before making the leap,' said Ampere's Harding-Rolls.
Ampere forecasts Switch 2 sales to exceed 100 million units in 2030. Nintendo has sold 152 million Switch units in total. - Reuters
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Irish Times
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- Irish Times
This is the moment when we find out just how mad a king Donald is
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Irish Times
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The victim delivered a searing impact statement. Just one thing felt off
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Please understand, a liveable future for humanity on this planet is really a very minor concern
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In order to provide such returns, the report makes clear, fossil fuel companies will have to keep producing the very material that is destroying any prospect of a liveable future for our planet. Regular readers of this column might remember that, earlier this year, I wrote about a book by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton called Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown. The book's title refers to the idea that we can temporary 'overshoot' safe planetary boundaries such as that set by the Paris Agreement, in the belief that we will be able to fix it at some point in the future, using a technology that has yet to be invented, but which the market will be sure to provide. This idea, according to Malm and Carton, has become increasingly normalised within the fossil fuel industry, and among the political establishments of western countries. READ MORE [ If mirrors in the sky are our best hope of saving the planet, we're in trouble Opens in new window ] 'The closer the Earth came to being engulfed in flames – literally and figuratively – the harder companies worked to get oil and gas and coal out of the ground and ferry them off to combustion,' write Malm and Carton. 'And so a notion began to take hold: that humanity had to reconcile itself to this state of affairs, accept what must not happen as a fait accompli, give up on the idea that emissions can be slashed at the speed required and instead try something else. The time had come, it was said, to postpone the lost cause. If the house was on fire, putting that fire out would have to wait. The age of overshoot was upon us.' In one sense, it's tempting to view this as the logic of a serious gambler: yes, we might be underwater now, but if we keep doubling down, eventually the chips will start falling in our favour, and the market will provide a solution, in the form of carbon capture or some as-yet-unthought-of technology. But this analogy only takes us so far, because the fossil fuel industry, from its own point of view, is not really gambling with anything of real value: what is at stake is merely a liveable future for humanity on this planet, really a very minor concern when placed alongside the ultimate value of short-term profit. To put it in slightly different terms, a liveable future might be of value to you as a human – as a parent or grandparent of children who will have to live in a world shaped by the ongoing consumption of fossil fuel energy – but it is of no relevance to your stock portfolio. If corporations are people – as is often pointed out in response to the juridical principle of corporate personhood – then they must surely be considered psychopaths. Few people in international politics have put the issue more forcefully than António Gutteres , the UN secretary general, who in 2022 – incensed by the fossil fuel companies using profits from soaring energy prices in the early period of the war in Ukraine to expand their fossil fuel explorations – said the following: 'We seem trapped in a world where fossil fuel producers and financiers have humanity by the throat. For decades, the fossil fuel industry has invested heavily in pseudoscience and public relations – with a false narrative to minimise their responsibility for climate change and undermine ambitious climate policies. They exploited precisely the same scandalous tactics as big tobacco decades before. Like tobacco interests, fossil fuel interests and their financial accomplices must not escape responsibility.' Four of the top five fossil-financing banks of 2024 – JP Morgan Chase , Bank of America , Citigroup and Wells Fargo – are American institutions (the fifth, Mizuho Financial Group, is Japanese). And so it's worth pointing out that the relevant figures here were all taken into account before the return to the US presidency of Donald Trump , whose official position on climate change is that it's 'a hoax' and 'bullshit'. Which is to say that capitalism had already grown weary of the pretence around sustainability well before Trump regained office and began the unprecedented assault on climate legislation and environmental protection of his first days in power. [ Sally Rooney: When are we going to have the courage to stop the climate crisis? Opens in new window ] As an economic system, capitalism is by its very nature unsustainable. It is predicated on growth at all costs: on growing consumption, growing markets, growing profits. The fuel that drives that growth is, and always has been, fossil carbon. And so there is something clarifying about this reversal on the part of the world's largest financial institutions – this clearing of, as it were, the smokescreen of environmental responsibility. It lays bare what can no longer be denied: that capitalism is incompatible with any kind of human flourishing on this planet.
