In the seven years since its release, the Nintendo Switch has become a beloved piece of hardware. Not only is it Nintendo’s best-selling console, it’s one of the most popular consoles of all time. It’s also the console that boosted Nintendo’s reputation after the poor reception of Wii U. In 2021, former Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aimé, looking back on the Switch, said it was a “make or break” console for Nintendo.
But behind the rose-colored glasses of the Switch’s success, Nintendo has faced its share of controversies. Since 2017, Nintendo’s been criticized for several issues related to the Switch console — like Joy-Con drift, the launch slate of Wii U ports, and hardware shortages. Ahead of Nintendo’s next-generation console, for which there will certainly be lots of new discourse, let’s look back at some of the controversies around the original Switch.
No, I’m not talking about the Switch shortage of 2020, when the console suddenly became nearly impossible to find. Nintendo also faced a Switch shortage upon the system’s release in 2017. People have long accused Nintendo of intentionally creating shortages of its products to hype up demand, and it was no different with the Switch. Nintendo sold nearly 2.8 million consoles in its first month of sales in March 2017, and said at that time it planned to have 10 million more units available by the end of that fiscal year. Nintendo vastly underestimated how many people wanted a Switch.
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It became so hard to find that Nintendo had to put out a statement that this wasn’t intentional. Nintendo senior director of corporate communications Charlie Scibetta told Ars Technica in June 2017 that Nintendo didn’t have an intentional plan “in terms of shorting the market.” The company was making consoles as fast as it could, he said.
“We anticipated there was going to be demand for it, but the demand has been even higher than we thought,” Scibetta said. “We had a good quantity for launch. [...] Unfortunately,
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