Nintendo expects to have sold more than 16.7 million Switch systems by the end of March 2018, a 4 million unit increase over its last public projection in April and good news for those hoping to find the supply-constrained system for the holiday season.

"Thanks to our component suppliers, who even opened up new production lines for the Switch, our ability to ship the console has improved drastically," Nintendo CEO Tatsumi Kimishima said, according to The Wall Street Journal . The executive also apologized for too-cautious initial forecasts of demand for the system, which led to widespread shortages . "We’ve boosted Switch production to meet strong demand as it was difficult for customers to buy the consoles at retail stores," he said (as quoted by Reuters ).

To date, Nintendo has sold 7.63 million Switch system worldwide, including 2.92 million between July and September. That's more than half way to the 13.56 million Wii U systems Nintendo sold over that console's nearly five-year lifespan. Projections for the Switch are more in line with the original Wii, which sold 13.17 million units in its first 10.5 months on the market, and Sony's PS4, which sold 13.5 million units in its first 10.5 months.

Nintendo isn't the only company scrambling to take advantage of the unexpectedly high demand for its latest console; third-party publishers were largely caught flat-footed by the system's popularity and are now working hard to port legacy games to the console post-haste. "We bet big on the Switch as a game changer so we began making games before the Switch’s launch, but many software companies showed reluctance in releasing Switch games before they witnessed the current success," Koei Tecmo CEO Yoichi Erikawa told The Wall Street Journal.

Nintendo also announced shipments of 1.7 million Super NES Classic units through the end of September, according to the WSJ's Takashi Mochizuki . That's more than the 1.5 million NES Classic units Nintendo sold by the end of 2016 and well on the way to that system's 2.3 million total sales by the time it was discontinued in April . Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime recently promised that production of the Super NES Classic had been "dramatically increased."