You crossed off sports games for being sports games. That is a monumental mistake. There is a certain type of game that comes out every single year with only slight changes and sells millions every year despite being essentially the exact same game as the year before: sports games.

Someone brought up that Nintendo tends to have lower attach rates. I would say that is because of sports games. Xbox and PS have always have much better sports games support than Nintendo has had (even genesis was the more sporty system than SNES). Your typical late teen or early twenties male video game player plays sports games. And they buy the same sports game every year or two. Look at Fifa, I can't believe how much that sells now, its almost at the Call of Duty level of millions of people buying the same damn thing every year. I didn't pay attention to video games from like 2012 until 2017 (the Switch brought me back in) and when I came back to this site I was flabbergasted by the monster that Fifa games had become.

Sports games inflate sales because huge sports fans will buy the same game every year.

So sure if you're talking about quality of a system's software in a historical context its easy to overlook sports games because who cares outside of that rare sports game that seems stands out or is memorable (for me I think of NBA Jam, NBA Live '95, NFL 2k, Virtual Tennis). I mean who now is gonna be like aww man Fifa 2008 and 2009 really blew me away? Right! But since we're talking about sales, sports games drive lots of repeat software sales every single year and they bring a whole demographic of gamers to a system simply by having the same sports game come out on a yearly basis on a system.

Nintendo's big games are franchises that for the most part come out once a generation. But they have had shoddy sports games support for most of their history now and therefore have missed out on probably like 20 million people in the world who will buy the same 2-3 sports games every couple of years. Your typical American sports gamer is probably gonna buy a couple Fifas, a couple NBAs, a couple NFLs games and maybe pick up one MLB game and one NHL game. And for europeans they'll probably buy the same Fifa game every year or two. And that in a single genre of games! The only game outside of sports that has found a yearly audience of just rinse and repeat for repeat sales is Call of Duty. Some games like Guitar Hero tried that and the market eventually dried up as it got over saturated, sports games will never become over saturated because sports fans care about having the current rosters.

If Switch can get all the major sports games (and good version of them) that could potentially bring in a lot of sports gamers who are like hell yeah I wanna be able to play Madden or Fifa on the go.

I think we can all agree that Wii wasn't the machine to go to in terms of quality RPGs (at least not reflected in sales). Wii was the machine for, well, Wii games (over 200M copies sold) and other first party games like MK, NSMB, Smash, Galaxy series, Mario Party series, DK and two LOZ games (130M combined).

In terms of excellent 10 RPGs for Wii I can think of, it's Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story, Fire Emblem, Okami, Monster Hunter, Rune Factory, Arc Rise, Pandora's Tower, Tales of Graces and Final Fantasy Fables, which all combined sold less than Mario & Sonic Olympics!!! (around 6.2M). That's 0.7% of all software sales.

Now let's move on to my top 10 3DS RPG titles: Bravely Default, Dragon Quest VII, Etrian Odyssey IV, Fire Emblem Fates, Rune Factory 4, Shin Megami Tensei 4, Yo-Kai Watch, Tales of the Abyss  ... at this point we're already at 9M mark (3%), now add all four Pokemon games and we're hitting almost 60M copies, which is almost 20% of all 3DS's software. And that's excluding Monster Hunter games and Xenoblade Chronicles (16M combined), but there's so many more that it's mind boggling.  There's no questions about it. 3DS is the machine to go for the RPG games in terms of quantity and quality, and that reflects in sales figures.

The top 10 selling Wii games account for more than a quarter of the total software units. I doubt we see that again in a console.

I think we should see this year through before we can make any prediction. If 20M+ sales per year becomes the norm for this console then 100 million or more should be sure fire. And since the Switch is actually in range of the PS4's prime year in it's second year, says a lot.

By the way, where is the 'year to date' for this year? It's still showing 2017.

I'm betting on 100 mln+ although I am a little concerned about the state of upcoming 1st party titles in 2018.
The sales curves are interesting. With the possible exceptions of GBA, I'd argue the charts sjow us which systems failed to catch on beyond Ninty fans.

Pretty sure the top 5 Switch games have over 50% of total software units sold at retail. I'm not sure where your doubt is coming from.

Right? And the 3DS also had good puzzle/mystery/platformers ect.
The Wii might have had Cod + Sports games, but that just doesnt matter at all to me.

I stand by my opinion that the 3DS has a stronger games library than the Wii did.

Also Im sorry thread has been derailed abit.
The reason we got here, was because someone said Software was all that mattered for sales.
I pointed out that 3DS > Wii in terms of software dispite selling less (even with lots of people collecting multiple 3ds's).

So back to the thread:
Software isnt enough to make sure a system is a success, imo.
Im not sure what the formula looks like to make sure a console does well, but its not enough that it has good software.

I'd hope that people would buy more than just Nintendo's top games. Instead of having an anemic overall library.

I would hope that as well but just having ~5-10% of the people who bought the big Nintendo games buying the big 3rd party games (Skyrim, FIFA, Doom) on the Switch is not a good sign. What's even more bizarre is when I see people tout those numbers as being good for 3rd parties on this website. It's not. Switch is doing great with indies. Not with big third party publishers at retail. Its on track to have much less software parity than the Wii, and I'm not seeing any recognition of this issue by anybody.

I'd think NEW 1st party software would naturally sell more than old ports (Skyrim, Doom), and  FIFA isn't a fair comparison either as Nintendo's strongest markets (NA, and Jap) aren't into soccer as much as Europe where the PS4 dominates. The Switch is a year old, too early to paint doom and gloom for 3rd parties just yet.