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Soundwave on 04 January 2017
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curl-6 said:
zorg1000 said:

It was never stated that everything is honky dory, obviously having the first annual losses in company history, a poor performing console and the lowest handheld shipments since the mid-90s are not things to be proud of.

The point was that even though things have been bad for the last few years, its not nearly as bad as some are making it out to be. Its just another case of people shouting that Nintendo is doomed despite things looking to be turning around.

My point was that reality lies somewhere in the middle; Nintendo is neither doing as well as some fans claim nor as badly as some detractors claim.

I would say it's probably closer to the "poor" side. 

If I said 5 years ago that the Wii successor would sell 14 million total and the DS successor would start petering out around 60 million .... Nintendo fans would be in complete disbelief and shock. Those numbers are shockingly on the low side for Nintendo. 

Even in that period between 1998-2001, the Game Boy (mostly the Game Boy Color) sold like 50 million hardware units in three years, so in a modern context, the portable sales Nintendo has today are a very large decline from any period they've had since the creation of Pokemon in the second half of the 1990s. 

If you want to say "you can't count the DS because of certain reasons", ok, but people don't realize from March 1999-March 2004, between the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance, even before the DS, Nintendo sold 105.82 million portables. 

In the last five fiscal years Nintendo has sold 62.69 million portables (this includes both 3DS and DS). That's more than a 20% drop off. 

This is why I think realistically 60 million might be the upper roof for the Switch, and getting even there could prove to be tough for Nintendo. These days their handheld division is selling more in the range of 12-13 million in a good year and 8-10 million in a more average year, the days of 20+ million shipments are long since over. The peak 3DS shipment for a year was 13.95 million.