 It looks like Nintendo was right. The Nintendo Switch is winding down and they definitely should not have increased their projections for sales this holiday season. And that makes a lot of sense, honestly. We've seen the Nintendo Switch sales decline every single year since 2020 when it peaked during the pandemic. And, you know, Nintendo has been projecting the downfall of Switch all year. If you remember, they started this entire fiscal year saying, oh, well, you know we're trying to sell people their second and third switches. That was already the indicator that Nintendo knew they were reaching the market saturation point. And if you don't know what the market saturation point is, it's essentially when you've already reached sort of the maximum amount of consumers in general that you can continue to sell systems to. Look, that doesn't mean that there isn't new people buying Switches here and there. New kids getting to enjoy their new toys here and there. It's not suggesting that there's nobody new buying Switches. It's just in order to maintain a certain sales pace, there isn't enough consumers left out there that really wanna partake to keep those sales high enough. So, look, they said they were gonna sell 15 million Switches this fiscal year, which is still an incredible number in year seven. And it's something no Nintendo system has ever sold in year seven. So this isn't meant to be a poo poo on you. But we now have data proving that Nintendo was probably right to not increase sales despite the fact that they had a record first couple of quarters in terms of Nintendo Switch sales. And most of that being carried by tears of the kingdom. So they appear to have made the correct choice. So we're gonna explain why. Also, the Pokemon company has come out and said some weird things. I mean, good things, I suppose, but weird things. This has to deal with the future of the entire Pokemon franchise in video games. So we'll get to that in a moment. First, let's just dive into what happened. So we have sales charts coming out. This is only for the UK, so it's a very small sample place. And yes, Hogwarts Legacy is back up at number one. It apparently had a really good debut on Nintendo Switch. Nintendo Switch is the second best boxed sales version of Hogwarts Legacy. Of course, they did note that if they do get some digital sales, which again, that would have to come from WB. If they got that digital sales data, it's possible it might have outsold at launch the PlayStation 5 version of the game. But it's hard to know right now. Obviously, for right now, it's number two in terms of the best-selling version of the game, but it bumped the overall sales, which does include other platforms of Hogwarts Legacy up to number one. But the big, brand-new exclusive game for Nintendo this holiday season is, well, Super Mario RPG. And I know big, brand-new feels weird to call it that. It's from the Super Nintendo, but they did position it as their big November game and it came in at number five, barely. Apparently, it was within a handful of sales of dropping to number six and possibly further down the chart. And this is one of the lowest debuts for Nintendo. Actually, I actually double-checked this beforehand. It is the lowest debut for a major holiday release for Nintendo in the UK since the system came out. And that's important to note because it does show that Super Mario RPG, it's not a game changer. It is not a big seller. It is not a system seller. It is not a big enough game to move units here in the holidays. And we kind of saw this coming. A lot of people thought maybe we should flip-flop Super Mario RPG and Super Mario Wonder, make Wonder the big holiday game, but Nintendo didn't do that. They put Wonder out in what is actually a pretty solid month there in October. They usually have something pretty good in October. Sometimes something really great in October. And then they usually just have that followed up by something that's just as great if not bigger in November. And this time around, there's no Pokemon. There's no Zelda. There's no other major stuff going on, a Mario Party. No, it's this Super Mario RPG, which I think Nintendo was hoping would carry the holidays, but they sort of figured maybe it won't. And it looks like it's sales data, at least the early sales data coming in, is that Super Mario RPG just sold all right. And you know what? There's nothing wrong with just selling all right unless you're supposed to be the primary reason to buy a system in the month of November, which is Nintendo's biggest sales month of the year, specifically right here in the United States. Technically December is the biggest sales month of the year over in Japan. So I find this to be quite fascinating because Nintendo essentially told us this the whole time. Yes, while Nintendo switches first two quarters of sales, according to the latest financial briefing, are indeed ahead of the first two quarters of last year and actually are the best first two quarters in sales in Nintendo history, a lot of that was built off of Tears of the Kingdom and then obviously the Mario movie helping move additional units and additional games. So there was a double whammy going on between the Mario movie and Tears of the Kingdom that gave Nintendo a record start to the year and yet they still chose to not adjust, still saying they hope to hit. They're not even positive they will hit 15 million even though they've already sold six million. So they'd only have to sell nine million during the holiday season in the last quarter of the year and Nintendo wasn't confident they were gonna do that. And I think we're seeing our first sign of that with Nintendo's major holiday games, Super Mario RPG, not being that big of a seller, not really moving the needle in terms of system sales either. It does appear that maybe Nintendo's about to have their lowest selling despite having all these bundles, right? They got the Animal Crossing to Horizon Switch Lite bundles, they got the Smash bundles, they got the Mario Kart bundles. Despite all of those bundles, Nintendo technically did not lower the price of any of their switches. So in not lowering the price, okay, you packed in a game. You used to do that when you launched systems. So people aren't gonna view that as a big deal and you're packing in games most people own. You're most popular games, Smash, Mario Kart and Animal Crossing. Most people just have those games. So you're not even packing in a game that might entice someone different to maybe buy your system. It's the same crowd you've been catering to every holiday for six or seven holidays now. So I do think Nintendo anticipated that they were gonna have pretty low holiday sales, the lowest in company history for Nintendo Switch. And if you think about that, let's say that they sell only six or seven million this holiday season, that puts their total for the fiscal year right around 13 million and then they'd have a couple months left, you know, after the holidays to try to get that up to 15, we're hoping that Princess Peach Showtime maybe could give a little boost at the end of the fiscal quarter. So Nintendo knew this was going to happen and I gotta give credit to them for not adjusting their metrics, not overreacting to the metrics coming in. Oh, this is the best first two quarters in Switch history. Hey, hey, hey, let's calm down. We see what's coming. We don't have major system sellers this holiday. We don't have other big typed games announced and look, the sales are starting to show that. They're on decline and that's okay. So again, Nintendo told us this was gonna happen for any one thing and we're not getting Switch to next year. Nintendo is setting the damn table. They're not increasing their sales projections. The sales of Switch are on the decline. They don't have major games this holiday season for the first holiday season. I mean, Mario Wonder is, by the way, a big game but it's not nearly as big as tears of the kingdom and there's nothing in the month of November which is their biggest sales month of the year. Nintendo is discounting a bunch of their games this holiday season which they never do by like 50% which is insane and it's insane because it's Nintendo and they never do that kind of thing. But why? They're trying to milk as many sales even software wise as they can out of this holiday season because they know this is probably the last holiday season Switch is going to be carrying by itself. So again, Nintendo's given us all the signs on what's gonna be happening. Now it's just the waiting game. But hey, you know what? I think Super Mario RPG is selling just fine. It's just only was ever gonna sell just fine. Now we get into the second part of this video and I wanna dive deep into this Pokemon thing but first I want to give all of our new subscribers a chance to get some free cookies. What are we talking about? Well, if you subscribe to the channel today, drop a like, you know what? You can enjoy these Oreo cookies raining down on all of us. They look pretty good. I almost wanna make a game out of it where I'm trying to eat the cookies but anyways, thank you guys so much for being here and I hope you enjoy the news. All right, so now we get to this interesting story coming from the UK news publication, The Guardian. They got to do an interview with the Pokemon company COO and what's interesting about Pokemon these days isn't so much that it's not wildly consistent and selling very well, it is. But Pokemon Scarlet and Violet got a lot of backlash online and the Pokemon company for the most part didn't really say anything. Nintendo said a few things and Nintendo acted embarrassed and they did this literally in the updates page for the game being like, yeah, we need to do something about this but the Pokemon company technically never really said anything about any of it and now we have a response sort of. Here's what the COO had to say. Regardless of whether we publicly respond, we're always paying close attention to the feedback and conversations happening in communities. There are certain aspects where we can't always be 100% aligned with the parts of the community are asking for and what we want to provide. Maybe the national dex thing. I know that was a big thing a couple of years ago. Anyways, what we do this with the desire to keep Pokemon going for a very long time and I believe that the fans and the players are aligned with us in that respect. So not admitting there's problems, not apologizing, not promising anything, just saying, hey man, we're paying attention, we're aware. And this was in response to questions about obviously the fan feedback and the performance of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. So while he's not gonna go out there and be like, we messed up, he's also saying, we hear ya. And while we don't align with everything you guys say, we do think your feedback is important. I think what's maybe key here is that the Pokemon company, Game Freak and all the rest are listening. Like they're paying attention to what people are saying. They're just not always gonna act on what is being said. But in terms of the quality of the quality control of the game and the QA testing and all the bugs and the performance, I think that's sort of stuff that they are going to listen to and will at least attempt to do better next time. Whether or not they can do better, I don't know. But I do like to at least hear that they're paying attention. And while a lot of things they're not gonna implement or listen to with the fan base, things like game performance, and we already know Nintendo was mad at them. So there's double pressure on the Pokemon company to not mess up like that again. You have pressure from the community and pressure from one of your parent companies. Like, look, Nintendo owns the Pokemon IP straight up. They like Pokemon trademarks and everything. 100% owned by Nintendo. Nintendo co-owns the Pokemon company, right? They helped found it. So look, Nintendo has a lot to say here. Nintendo's coming down hard. They're also listening to fan feedback, which was pretty harsh. I do think that they are feeling the pressure to make sure the next major Pokemon game they drop doesn't have these problems. So I guess we'll just see what happens. It's always wishful thinking that the Pokemon company, they'll just do better next time. And then the next time comes and it's not always better. And the sad thing is Scarlet and Violet had a lot of good things going its way. There are legitimate criticisms beyond the performance like, oh, the world at times feels a little dead, can't enter all the buildings and some of the NPCs just stand there and do nothing. There's things that they could improve upon in general, but at least it was a good start into what could be something really special down the line. It's just, man, dude, the bugs, the frame rate drops, none of it just feels like it should exist when we have so much bigger, better looking games doing more things on this platform in an open world setting. Hello, tears of the kingdom. Anyways, guys, let me know what you think about this down in the comments below. I am Nathan and RoboJance from Nintendo Prime. It's been a lot of fun talking to you guys. Be sure to join our live stream tonight. We're gonna be doing our voting for the game awards and also going over some killer Black Friday deals at GameStop that I don't think you guys should miss, regardless of what you think of GameStop. Look, saving money, saving money, so if they can get you a good deal, we shouldn't ignore it. Catch you guys in the next video.