In December of 2017, former President of Nintendo, Tatsumi Kimishima, revealed their very ambitious goal to sell 20 million units in hardware by the end of 2018; encouraged by the momentum the Nintendo Switch had gained since it was launched in March of 2017.
Over the course of 2018, that goal seemed less, and less; to the point that Shuntaro Furukawa, the current President of Nintendo, announced that they were setting a new goal of 17 million Nintendo Switch units to sell by the end of the year — which still seemed a bit unrealistic, but the company was confident they'd be able to meet that goal.
During a recent Q+A session of their financial briefing, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa revealed that the company had not been able to reach that very ambitious goal they set for themselves in regards to hardware sales; blaming it on their incapacity to convey the appeal of the Nintendo Switch to consumers.
"As we look back so far (for this fiscal year), we now evaluate that our efforts to fully convey the appeal of Nintendo Switch hardware and software to the number of new consumers we originally hoped to reach were insufficient. And from the viewpoint of our full-year unit sales forecast for this fiscal year, while we expected that releasing titles during the holiday season would help to increase sales, the year-on-year sales increase during the first half of the fiscal year (April to September) turned out not big enough, which also affected the revision of the unit forecast as we looked back now."
Furukawa then proceeds to reveal their plans for the future, optimistically stating that they hope to increase hardware and software sales in 2019 by conveying the Nintendo Switch's appeal to consumers.
"We will talk about the next fiscal year in more detail at a later time, but basically we want to further increase both our hardware and software unit sales more than this fiscal year. We want to further enrich our software lineup and convey its appeal to consumers, so that they decide this (calendar) year they would buy Nintendo Switch."
While sales for Pokémon Let's Go, Pikachu/ Eevee! and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate brought the company a lot of revenue during the holiday shopping season, first party titles this past year were scarce; with Pokémon and Super Smash Bros. — last year's heavy hitters — releasing in Q4 of 2018. Hopefully Nintendo manages to reach their goals this year, but they'll have to start listening to the consumer in order to keep that initial momentum going.