With mass production on Nintendo's brand new platform set to kick off, an anonymous component supplier states that it expects to ship roughly 10-12 million NX consoles.

There's very little known about Nintendo's successor to the Wii U, but the company is already banking big on the unrevealed hardware. Reports thus far have indicated that the Big N is hoping to ship around 20 million units within the first year of the NX platform's lifecycle, but an upstream supplier (a company that obtains the raw materials necessary for manufacturing) for the new console has reportedly confirmed that it expects the system to ship around 10-12 million.

This report comes from Digitimes, a Taiwanese website that has intimate knowledge of these sorts of matters, although the company selected to create the NX, Foxconn Electronics, is keeping mum on the finished deal. As a point of reference, the website states that its analysts foresee Nintendo's hardware having to ship 10 million units just to stay relevant alongside Xbox One and PS4 – which the site speculates should ship 13 and 18 million units, respectively.

Considering that the new console is rumored to be both a home and portable gaming device, these new numbers don't seem all that farfetched; especially since the 20 million unit mark that the house of Mario was hoping to achieve within the NX's first year struck many as a bit of a stretch. Apparently mass production is set to get underway at the end of the first quarter of 2016, which means that a launch next year is highly likely.

Keeping that in mind, there are still several major games in development that could very well end up arriving for the next-gen platform. For example, The hotly anticipated The Legend of Zelda for Wii U was pushed into 2016, and is currently sitting with no known release date – which means it could be a dual-system release, similar to The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Meanwhile, the fourth entry in the Pikmin franchise is said to almost be done, and could easily find itself launching on the NX if the platform truly isn't all that far away.

What's more intriguing is that Nintendo has held off on formally unveiling the NX for quite some time, and, if reports are true, then gamers won't be waiting very long to get their hands on the hardware. This strategy would then seem reminiscent of Fallout 4's, given that Bethesda intentionally held off on revealing the game until it was only a few months out from launch. Given the upcoming holiday window, however, it would make sense that Nintendo would want to hold off revealing a new console during its strongest sales season.

Are you looking forward to seeing the Nintendo NX? Which games do you think will launch with it? Get at us in the comments.

Source: Digitimes