Succeeding the Switch: the Switch 2 (2025)

How to succeed a giant success

The crux of this decision was the question of when, and in what form, to release the successor to a record-selling machine. Nintendo had before seen unit sales fall with the successors to the DS and Wii — the ‘second-generation jinx,’ in which the larger the prior generation, the more the next one struggles. Faced with the hard problem of following a first Switch of some 150 million units, the company chose not a change of course but continuity: it kept the hybrid form that doubles as home console and handheld, prepared backward compatibility so that first-generation software still plays, and bet on a design that carries its accumulated assets and users straight into the next generation.

That said, it was not the continuity design alone that carried the launch. The figures — 3.5 million units worldwide in four days, 6 million in seven weeks, and 15 million by December 2025, the fastest ever — were possible only because of the user base built over eight years with the first Switch and the strength of connecting to it seamlessly through backward compatibility. In the United States tariffs threatened the price, and preorders were postponed before launch, but Nintendo rode it out without moving the console’s price or release date. A giant prior success can be a burden or a foothold for the generation that follows; whether the first Switch’s assets become that foothold will be decided by the sales cycle still to come.