Sales of Switch and PS5 held back by chip shortages

polygon.com:

Sony and Nintendo, reporting their financial results for the fiscal year ending March 2022, have both blamed shortages in semiconductor components for sales shortfalls in their flagship consoles.

Sony said it shipped 11.5 million PlayStation 5 consoles in the course of the financial year. This brought the total number of PS5s sold to 19.3 million, but it is still more than 3 million short of the most recent target the company set.

Meanwhile, Nintendo reported that combined sales of all three Switch consoles — Switch, Switch Lite and the new OLED model — were down 20% year-over-year. “Sales this fiscal year were affected by shortages of semiconductor components and other parts,” Nintendo said in its statement, although it also noted that “the March 2020 release ofAnimal Crossing: New Horizons was a major driver of hardware sales last fiscal year” — a reference to the huge sales boost that game received during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic.

The two companies gave rather different outlooks for the year ahead, however. Sony is optimistic, telling investors on the earnings call (as reported by VGC) that it felt “very comfortable” it could ramp up PS5 shipments to 18 million in the fiscal year ending March 2023, a considerable increase on this year’s performance. Certainly, consumer appetite to buy the consoles is there, if Sony can manage to build them.

Nintendo, however, said it expected sales and operating profits to be slightly down over the next 12-month period. Its statement to investors didn’t give an explicit reason for this. Reading between the lines, a slightly thin software line-up (featuring Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, but not the delayed sequel to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild) would seem