Switch 2 to break 100 million sales: EA founder Trip Hawkins

Electronic Arts original founder Trip Hawkins believes the Switch 2 will beat 100 million sales in its lifetime, becoming the 5th Nintendo system to do so.

Switch 2 to break 100 million sales: EA founder Trip Hawkins
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TL;DR: EA founder Trip Hawkins predicts the Nintendo Switch 2 will exceed 100 million lifetime sales, continuing Nintendo's family-oriented hardware success. He advises Sony and Microsoft to avoid the handheld market dominated by Nintendo and foresees cloud gaming replacing traditional consoles, shifting power to data center GPUs and streaming services.

EA founder Trip Hawkins has laid out some predictions and thoughts about the Nintendo Switch 2 and the future of next-gen hardware in a Medium blog post.

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Nintendo is gearing up for the Switch 2's release in June, and forecasts indicate there could be up to 20 million Switch 2 consoles produced in the first year. The successor is also expected to potentially ship as many as 8 million units at launch. Everyone is talking about the Switch 2, even industry figures from a long-ago era like EA and 3DO founder Trip Hawkins.

In a recent blog post, Hawkins laid out his predictions for the Switch 2, and they're quite straightforward: The Switch 2 will break 100 million sales in its lifespan.

"I fully expect Switch 2 to exceed 100 million units sold in its lifetime, just like its predecessor. This will be the 5th Nintendo platform to exceed 100 million (DS, Switch, GameBoy, Wii, Switch 2) and every one of these has been family-oriented. Sony's PS1, PS2 and PS4 are the only others in history to sell this well," Hawkins said, noting Nintendo's history of incredible hardware sales.

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  • Wii - 101.63 million
  • Game Boy - 118.69 million
  • Switch - 150.86 million
  • DS - 154.02 million

Interestingly enough, some analysts don't think the Switch 2 will outsell the original Switch, which is currently at 150.86 million as of the holidays.

Hawkins goes on to say that Microsoft and Sony shouldn't enter the handheld market because Nintendo already has the market share for children, which has consistently been the main driver for handheld adoption.

"It would be crazy for anyone else to enter the handheld market because you can't beat Nintendo with the kids and you have no prized, exclusive games that will pull adults away from playing on their high-powered phones," Hawkins said.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is reportedly experimenting with one such handheld device, and Sony is also doing the same with a PlayStation handheld capable of playing PS5 games.

When it comes to next-gen consoles, the EA founder believes that cloud gaming will soon take over, and console power will be in server racks rather than dedicated systems in the living room.

"As for the next generation of consoles, we're now in a glide plane where the cloud is everything and it will be far more convenient to have rack-mounted GPUs in data centers than to try to convince the public to buy more consoles, at higher prices, than they have in the past. We will never see another conventional console sell 150 million units, like the PlayStation 2 did.

"The technical prowess of PCs, current consoles and even the newer smartphones is increasingly comparable and good enough, and even for Sony and Microsoft it will soon make more sense to focus on their game streaming subscription services instead of losing money on hardware manufacturing and marketing.