Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa said in a briefing for analysts that the Nintendo Switch Lite isn’t cannibalizing sales of its older sibling Nintendo Switch.
The more compact and lightweight Switch Lite is a dedicated handheld which doesn’t dock to display games on a television, as the Switch can. It launched worldwide in September, and sales are strong.
Furukawa showed a chart that showed the Switch Lite’s weekly sales compared to the sales of the Switch, which continues to sell well.
“Looking at the state of this initial response, I would say Nintendo Switch Lite generating its own demand, without negatively impacting sales trends for Nintendo Switch,” Furukawa said. “In fact, sales of Nintendo Switch (shown in gray) grew noticeably in the week following the launch of Nintendo Switch Lite. That was the same week as the release of Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age – Definitive Edition and the launch of a special Dragon Quest-edition Nintendo Switch in the Japanese market.”
And Furukawa said that a higher percentage of women are buying the Nintendo Switch Lite.
“Furthermore, the pool of consumers purchasing Nintendo Switch Lite during the initial launch period includes not only users purchasing it as their first system, but also a good number of consumers purchasing it as their second system from the Nintendo Switch family,” he said.
“Among these consumers buying Nintendo Switch Lite as a second system, some are doing so to supplement a single Nintendo Switch console shared among the family, while others are opting to buy Nintendo Switch Lite as a compact, lightweight system to take on the go,” Furukawa said.
And so Nintendo is now launching a specially designed Nintendo Switch Lite for the Japanese market, ahead of the release of Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield. Before the release of last year’s Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee!, most Pokémon series titles were released for handheld game systems.
“We think this will make the handheld Nintendo Switch Lite a familiar and enticing proposal to Pokémon fans,” Furukawa said.