Endgame: Nintendo Switch sales are dropping

5/9/23 8:00PM

Yesterday, video game giant Nintendo announced a 22% drop in sales of its flagship Nintendo Switch console in its latest fiscal year — a trend that the company expects to continue as the console enters its endgame.

Before the release of the Switch in March 2017, Nintendo had been through a tough few years. The company posted its first loss as a video game company in 2012, and then released its worst-selling console ever, the Wii U, in the same year, which was hoped to replace the fading 3DS. However, the Switch — played as a handheld console or on a TV — finally nailed the hybrid format, selling more than 14 million units worldwide in its first year. Today, the Switch stands as the third best-selling game console of all time, only behind the DS and PlayStation 2, with over 125 million units sold, accounting for 95% of the company's sales last year.

‍Consoling

‍However, with President Shuntaro Furukawa saying that selling 15 million units this year “is a bit of stretch” — and with limited information known about potential successor consoles — investors in Nintendo will have to place blind faith in the company pulling off a big platform pivot at some point. For any other company that might be a leap, but for Nintendo — which has pulled off a similar switch 7 or 8 times in its history, with video game credentials dating back to the NES in the 1980s — it feels possible, if not even likely.

In the shorter term, the company will be hoping that the much-anticipated release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, a sequel to the smash hit Breath of the Wild, will sustain demand for the platform… for one more year at least.

Chris Stokel-Walker

Bot bias

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5