So... Will Nintendo be able to ship those 20 million Switch units?

[The_Liquid_Laser]

Supermario28 said:

I tried to do some very rough maths to see what impact Smash and Pokemon should have to make these 20 millions possible.

According to vg chartz:
Switch sold 4'440'000 units in five months in 2018. it's 888'000 units per month. To do the math, i consider these like regular months without big releases. (http://www.vgchartz.com/article/276881/year-on-year-sales-amp-market-share-charts-june-2-2018/
Between early october and december 2017, Switch sold 6'800'000 units (2'266'666 / month). It includes holiday season, black friday and SMO release.

 

So now if we multiply Switch regular months sales by the number of regular months it's:

888'000 * 9 = 7'992'000 Units, We can say 8'000'000. I counted from April 2018 to September 2018 (6 months) and from January 2019 to March 2019 (3 months, end of FY 2018)

Let's say we add 1 milion of uncertainty, the total sale for 9 regular months is 9'000'000 Units. (1'000'000/month)

Soooooo it leaves 11'000'000 units to sale in three holiday months, 3'666'666/month (October/november/december). it's more or less 4'000'000 units more than last holiday season

It represents a 60% increase compared to last year's holiday. I'm talking about sold through and not shipped.

 

Do yo think Smash and pokemon will be able to move this amount of systems? I think it could be very difficult to reach the target

These calculations seem fairly reasonable to me.

I have been fairly pessimistic about Nintendo so far for this year, but I am going to have to amend my predictions.  I was originally projecting 12m, but now I think they will sell at least 16m, maybe more.  Here are two big games that I didn't think they'd get.

1) Pokemon Let's Go - It's not going to sell quite as well as a mainline Pokemon game, but it is still going to sell extremely well.  Kids and Pokemon Go players are going to want this game making it a huge holiday title.  I was confident that GameFreak couldn't get out a mainline Pokemon title this year, and while I was technically right, this game is really the best possible spinoff they could have ever put out.

2) Fortnite - This game is huge right now, and Switch is really the ideal platform to play it on.  I was shocked to find out just how much money people are spending on this "free to play" game.  

"In a survey of 1,000 Fortnite players, financial education company Lendedu found that 68.8% of them have spent at least some money on in-game Fortnite purchases. And among those who spend cash inside the wildly popular battle royale game, average spending tops $84.67."
http://fortune.com/2018/06/27/fortnite-average-spending/

I wouldn't be surprised if Switch hardware sales just magically start going up even though it won't have any big retail games until the end of the year.  Fortnite is going to be the game moving hardware until Nintendo can out their big first party games.