Japanese gaming giant Nintendo expects 10% fewer sales

Beijing: Hit by semiconductor shortage amid the ongoing Shanghai lockdown, Japanese gaming giant Nintendo is reportedly looking at 10 per cent fewer sales in the current fiscal year.

According to Nikkei Times, Nintendo expects to sell only about 20 million Switch game consoles, a 10 per cent decrease from fiscal 2021.

The slow growth will come despite strong demand, as a semiconductor shortage and disruptions to logistics networks hamper production, the report said late on Saturday.

The Shanghai lockdown has hampered production lines of several tech, chip and gaming companies.

In February, the Nintendo Switch outsold the Microsoft Xbox Series X and Sony PlayStation 5 in both unit and dollar sales.

So far in 2022, the Switch has sold the most units, according to reports.

The Switch, a now five-year-old console, has become slightly easier to find in stores and online despite Nintendo cutting its production by 20 per cent through March 2022.

Nintendo’s latest software update includes a feature that has the ability to group games on users home screen.

Users can create up to 100 groups containing up to 200 titles each, so they can sort everything however they want even if they accumulated quite the collection over the years.

In addition to groups, the latest software update will also allow adjusting a Bluetooth device’s volume on the device itself, so long as it supports AVRCP profiles.

Also, Nintendo has increased the max volume for some Bluetooth devices.

Meanwhile, key enterprises have resumed 80-90 per cent of their production in Shanghai which is under Covid lockdowns.

China has established a “whitelist” approach to support the resumption of work for key companies and minimise the impact of Covid-19 on the supply chain, according to reports.