Sony and Nintendo say their consoles will likely be in short supply all of 2022; Nintendo's president: “there's no end in sight to the semiconductor shortage”
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second straight May that Sony has told investors PS5 supply won't normalize: its warning a year ago paired a 14.8M-unit fiscal-year target with a shortfall caveat, and Microsoft had already conceded Xbox would sell every unit it could make (through at least June 2021). What changes today is scope — Nintendo joining the warning makes this an industry-wide condition rather than a PlayStation problem, and Nintendo's president goes further than his peers by calling the shortage open-ended.
The chip industry pre-flagged exactly this timeline: Intel, Nvidia, and TSMC executives said in April 2021 the crunch would run at least into 2022 and possibly 2023 ([[a:965335]]). Today's statements are the console makers confirming that forecast landed on their product lines, after early data already showed PS5 and Xbox Series launch-week sales in Japan running below their predecessors — a demand signal masked by supply.
First-order effects
- Nintendo's Switch output and Sony's PS5 pipeline are capped by chip allocation for the remainder of 2022, extending the scarcity consumers have faced since the November 2020 launches and putting both companies' unit forecasts at risk.
- All three console makers are now bidding for the same foundry output simultaneously, since Microsoft's Xbox constraint was documented over a year before this warning.
Second-order effects
- Supplier leverage hardens: with Nintendo's president describing no end in sight, console makers lose negotiating room on allocation and pricing, and Sony's response is to convert dependence into ownership via the planned Sony–TSMC Kumamoto joint venture (roughly $6.3B, Sony about 60%), which secures dedicated Japanese fab capacity beginning with image-sensor lines.
- Hardware scarcity shifts each company's revenue mix toward what it can actually ship — software, services, and accessories attached to a constrained installed base — rather than counting on console unit growth.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, scarcity stops being a launch-window problem and starts shaping roadmap architecture itself: later reporting has sources pointing to Sony considering a next PlayStation pushed to 2028 or 2029 and Nintendo weighing Switch 2 price increases amid a memory-chip shortage ([[a:1163563]]).
- Console generations lengthen and hardware gets repriced upward when chips are the binding constraint — a shift analysts had already surfaced by flagging a holiday season where the seven-year-old Switch and the $700 PS5 Pro left Nintendo and Sony with little compelling to sell ([[a:879201]]).
The trend: Semiconductor scarcity is turning console planning supply-led rather than demand-led, stretching hardware lifecycles and pushing platform holders toward contracted fab capacity.