Nintendo Reportedly Plans To Double Switch Production In 2018 (engadget.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The Switch, Nintendo's latest hybrid console is doing pretty well for the company, which expects it to outdo the Wii U's lifetime sales within a year. The company obviously thinks so, too, according to a new report at The Wall Street Journal, which says that Nintendo plans to ramp up production of the hardware itself, beginning in April 2018. The report claims that Nintendo is planning to make 25 million to 30 million more units of its successful Switch console over the next fiscal year. Further, Nintendo may plan for even more if this year's holiday sales are strong, according to the WSJ's sources. The company has already built almost 8 million Switches, total, as of its latest earnings report.

Comments

Nintendo remembers fun

[thegarbz]

As a Switch owner, PS4 owner and card carrying member of the PC master race there's one thing Nintendo has over all other platforms: They remember how to make fun games. So much of gaming (especially AAA titles) has become and incredibly boring grindfest, or graphics over story / substance. I think I have spent more time on the Switch this year than the two other gaming platforms combined.

supply chain management

[Speare]

So the Switch is still very hard to get in Japan, where you have to show up on shipment day at dawn, or you have to get a lottery draw through a mobile app. If you pay an extra 10000 yen (US$100), you can get one right away, so there's a scalper's economy. It's starting to ship regularly to USA and Europe, with 1-per-customer limits still in place in some areas. This is all what, 8~9 months after release? Add on top of that, the way-under-produced mini-NES/mini-SNES batches. Where is Nintendo's supply chain management? They have good relations with their assembly suppliers, they should be able to say "dedicate another couple lines for this month." They should have good relations with their memory, screen and other component suppliers also. Few other devices out there are struggling to get their parts, anything like Nintendo this year. It's like printing money, but the printer is broken.

Re:supply chain management

[scary_jeff]

Lots of memory parts have had very long lead times or even been on allocation for some time now. You get what you ordered 4+ months ago, and that's it. Everything that the factory is producing has already been sold, so it doesn't matter how good your relationship with the supplier is. I wouldn't be surprised if the volumes generated by a mass market product like a games console caused even longer lead times. According to iFixIt, the Switch uses a Toshiba eMMC NAND flash, and this part currently has a 20 week lead time; that's nearly 5 months between deciding you want to increase production of your product, and having the parts to do it.

The Nintendo Console

[RyoShin]

Especially with no other news (AFAIK) regarding their handheld side, which has been their bread-and-butter since the N64, it appears more-and-more that Nintendo is just going to have "the console" which straddles the gap between handheld and TV-only machine.

This actually places them in a very interesting (and good) position, where they are no longer competing directly against Xbonex/PS4, but act more as a "secondary" option. As the DOOM port shows, while the system does have far less power that doesn't preclude hefty games from running on it, and the games that look or run better on the main two consoles can't be played portably with them. I think you'd have a hard time even getting a laptop to be as convenient, as you couldn't pull it out for a few minutes of gaming while on the bus and then stash it away again.