Yes, just trying to answer your question directly. But to riff a little bit/a lot...
I am very confident that Nintendo intended to launch a New Switch in fall of this year, that they contracted 3rd parties to build launch games for the device, and that those third parties had not received a change in the launch schedule of fall of last year. I think to look at the set of facts on the ground and come away with a radically different theory is at best an unconvincing interpretation of the data.
I have very little confidence that I know Nintendo's plan now, what 3rd parties are currently being told, or the eventual launch timing of the device. I'm just shooting in the dark like everyone else who isn't an actual journalist or insider. The general assumption seems to be that Nintendo's plans have changed, which I think is probably true but even that is still guessing. Maybe they haven't at all!
I am modestly confident that if Nintendo's plans have shifted, they are not primarily driven by consumer demand for the Classic Switch. Nintendo was telling Devs that there as a 2022 launch date as recently as ~6 months ago. Have the sales of fiscal 2021 been so far beyond Nintendos expectation that they would change direction now? I don't buy it. I do buy that if Nintendo is pushed to delay the revision, that the sales of the Current Switch make that decision much easier.
I do believe that any number of hardware, software, or political issues could delay the device. I am mixed on the effect of the chip shortage being a driver - I think the writing was on the wall a while ago, and Nintendo was telling partners 6 months ago that they were on schedule. But it isn't inconceivable to me that Nintendo saw a chance of making it and didn't want to spook partners.
I am only modestly confident that Drake is the revision. Occam's razor suggests it is, but I don't think folks who say "Drake looks like a successor, and I don't see how they cram that thing into a Switch case, perhaps there is a revision that is more modest out there and the two devices are being mixed up, like the OLED" are mad conspiracy theorists. It would neatly explain why Drake seems almost untenably beefy, but again, I'm modestly confident that it's just one device. Modestly.
These are my prior assumptions when talking about The Next Nintendo Thingy. I realize this is a deep tangent from your original post, but I get frustrated when people confuse fact for analysis, and analysis for predictions.
I don't see any specific evidence which suggests that Nintendo's plans have shifted. Our personal expectations may have shifted, but that doesn't necessarily mean any change on Nintendo's part, just the information available to us. In particular (although I'm not ascribing this to you, just a general point that has been brought up a lot), a lot of people have taken the Nvidia leaks as an indication that the hardware has been pushed back, or completely redesigned, because it's a much larger GPU than any of us were expecting. When reconciling it with our previous expectations that it would be an 8nm chip with a much smaller GPU, it's tempting to think that the smaller 8nm chip must have existed at some point, but was replaced by this more powerful chip on a more advanced node. However it's far more likely that our earlier speculation was simply wrong, and Drake was always planned to be exactly as it is. Even the manufacturing process is still nothing but speculation, and we're inferring a change of plan on Nintendo's part based on a change from one piece of speculation to another.
Personally, I would expect that the decision to make the new model (whether it's a revision or a successor or whatever) would have been finalised some time in the second half of 2019 or the first half of 2020. This is just based on a roughly 3 year timeline needed to bring out a new device with a semi custom SoC. Therefore, both the release timeline and the design of the hardware would have likely been based on Nintendo's pre-covid projections for Switch, or at the very least it wouldn't have accounted for continued high sales into 2021 and 2022. Substantial changes to the SoC in particular after this point would have been both very expensive and would have caused long delays (potentially a year or more), and there's no evidence to suggest this has happened. In fact, as far as I'm aware there are NVN2/Drake references in the Nvidia leak going back to 2019, which would corroborate the idea that work started pre-covid.
So, with the design being settled pre-covid, and there being no evidence of a change in plans from Nintendo's part, I would agree that the bumper hardware sales over the past couple of years haven't changed Nintendo's plans. It would make it easier for them to delay a few months, but there's no reason to believe they've pushed it back multiple years or called for a significant change in the design. In particular I think the most important factor to Nintendo isn't actually hardware sales anyway, it's software sales. That's where they make the majority of their profit, and it's a more meaningful metric of the engagement of their audience.
Usually software sales peak later than hardware and trail off more slowly, but it's worth noting that this time last year, coming off a record year of Switch sales, Nintendo actually forecast an almost 18%
decline in software sales for the subsequent financial year (see page 9
here). That forecast has been changed since, but as of their most recent forecast in January (page 8
here) they were still predicting a year on year decline in software sales. With hardware sales down from FY21 to FY22, it would be expected that their FY23 forecast would almost certainly predict a drop in software sales again. What's interesting is that, during a period when they expect software sales to decrease, they've just started reporting a "Annual Playing Users" figure in their most recent report. This is very likely to track closely to software sales, so it seems strange that they would introduce it at a point where they expect it to start going down.
When asked about this in the accompanying financial briefing (page 3
here), Furukawa included this in his response:
There are currently nearly 100 million annual playing users, and going forward, it is important to consider how we can maintain and expand on that number. This will also be essential when we consider our plan for the next hardware platform.
I don't want to read too much into what "next hardware platform" means specifically, but it does seem that keeping a high number of annual playing users is important to Nintendo, and that it factors into their hardware planning.
I think the traditional approach to new gaming hardware is often misconstrued as "wait until hardware sales fall off a cliff, then introduce new hardware", whereas in reality it has more nuance, in that hardware manufacturers have tried to predict when software sales will fall off, and try to introduce new hardware at a point where the profit lost from cannibalising software sales on the old hardware is made up by the profit gained by new software sales the new hardware can generate. With the lines of software ecosystems blurring or disappearing altogether between generations, though, I don't think that approach really applies any more.
For Nintendo in their current circumstance, they have told us their focus is on maintaining active users, as these users will buy software which makes profit. As the software ecosystem will be shared between the Switch and this new model, the question isn't about the new model cannibalising the old one, but rather how they can most effectively grow the number of active users on their software ecosystem. The logical answer to that is that new hardware should be introduced at the point where old hardware can no longer continue to grow the active user base. For Switch, that time is likely in the next year or so. Even back in late 2019, if you asked Nintendo when the Switch would hit that point, they likely would have said in late 2022 or thereabouts. The absolute size of the active user base is higher than they would have expected, but I don't think the timing of the drop has changed all that much.
