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After a several-week delay, Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders are set to kick off tonight in the United States. While hundreds of thousands of hopeful gamers will likely be refreshing the websites of Best Buy, Target, and Walmart, hoping to be lucky enough to successfully push an order through and secure their piece of the first Switch 2 wave, Nintendo also asked interested players to register their My Nintendo accounts as interested in pre-ordering the upcoming system to enter into a lottery. However, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa took to Nintendo’s Japanese social media accounts to share some bad news regarding the lottery system.
According to a post shared on Nintendo’s Japanese X account, Nintendo received 2.2 million interested players in Japan alone. If that number is truly representative of the number of players who want to purchase a Switch 2 in Japan, it would far exceed the initial Japanese sales numbers of the Switch 1, which, according to VentureBeat, reached just over 313,000 units in its first weekend. In the console’s first month, Nintendo sold 2.74 million units worldwide, meaning that the 2.2 million Japanese registrations nearly reaches that number on its own.
According to Furukawa, Nintendo cannot fulfill all of those requests at launch. However, if you register through the My Nintendo Store and are not selected to purchase during the first wave, you will have another chance once the company can replenish its supply.
You can see the full translation of Furukawa’s post from X below.
Hello, this is Furukawa. We have been procuring many materials and proceeding with production in advance so that we can deliver the Nintendo Switch 2 to you. On April 2nd, we announced details about the Nintendo Switch 2 and started accepting applications for the lottery sale on the My Nintendo Store. As a result, we received an extremely large number of applications, approximately 2.2 million people in Japan alone. However, this number far exceeds our expectations, and far exceeds the number of Nintendo Switch 2 consoles that can be delivered from the My Nintendo Store on June 5th. Therefore, unfortunately, we expect that a significant number of customers will not be selected when the winners are announced tomorrow, April 24th.
In order to avoid the trouble of those who were not selected in the first lottery sale having to reapply, My Nintendo Store will automatically carry over those who were not selected in the first lottery sale to the second lottery sale. However, even including the quantity for the second lottery sale, we cannot fulfill all of the applications we received. We deeply apologize for not being able to meet your expectations despite our prior preparations.
In response to this demand, we are currently working on further strengthening our production system. In addition, starting tomorrow, April 24th, game retailers and online stores nationwide will begin accepting pre-orders or lottery sales for the Nintendo Switch 2 console (please check the information of each retailer for details). The console will also continue to be sold at the My Nintendo Store after the release date (more details will be announced at a later date). With the cooperation of retailers, we will continue to ship the console and make efforts to get as many Nintendo Switch 2 consoles as possible into your hands.
We plan to continue producing and shipping a considerable number of Nintendo Switch 2 units in the future. We apologize for the delay in our ability to meet your expectations, and we appreciate your understanding.
Though Furukawa alludes to it, he doesn’t directly say that Nintendo will be unable to fulfill demand through its retail partners. Still, with the company seeing such increased demand in its home country, players worldwide will likely encounter fierce competition and, more than likely, frustration while trying to get their hands on a launch model Switch 2. Nintendo Switch 2 arrives on June 5. For more on the console, you can read our hands-on impressions here.
