Nintendo President Says The Switch Is “In The Middle of Its Lifecycle” After Five Years

If peo­ple were hop­ing Nin­ten­do would be get­ting close to announc­ing a com­plete­ly new con­sole, then you’re in for a let­down. Nin­ten­do Pres­i­dent Shuntaro Furukawa believes the Switch is “just in the mid­dle of its lifecycle.”

Dur­ing Nin­ten­do’s earn­ings call, Furukawa shared that the Switch has sur­passed 100 mil­lion units sold, mak­ing it the best-sell­ing home con­sole for the com­pa­ny. The Switch’s aging hard­ware and ongo­ing glob­al chip short­age has­n’t appeared to both­er Furukawa. “Switch is just in the mid­dle of its life­cy­cle, and the momen­tum going into this year is good,” he stat­ed dur­ing an inter­view with Bloomberg. “The Switch is ready to break a pat­tern of our past con­soles that saw momen­tum weak­en­ing in their sixth year on the mar­ket and grow further.”

Despite his con­fi­dence, Bloomberg reports that Nin­ten­do has nev­er­the­less cut its fourth-quar­ter sales out­look from 24 mil­lion to 23 mil­lion, due to the glob­al sup­ply chain short­ages. How­ev­er, the Switch is still expect­ed to keep a great lead ahead of its com­peti­tors, as Sony and Microsoft are strug­gle with sup­ply as well.

Nin­ten­do con­soles are typ­i­cal­ly released every five or six years, so the Switch–which ini­tial­ly released in 2017–is com­ing in on what would be usu­al­ly be con­sid­ered its final years. Furukawa’s words could indi­cate a longer wait time to see infor­ma­tion about the new hard­ware, or he’s sim­ply say­ing he will sup­port the Switch well into the life­cy­cle of the next console.