Kimishima expects Switch sales to reach Wii levels

[Louie]

It's entirely possible.
Kimishima knows his numbers. As I said in another thread: Nintendo is an integrated company. Integrated companies thrive whenever technology in a certain market is not "good enough" yet. With the Wii U Nintendo made the horrible mistake of pursuing technology that was already good enough (we have TVs, handhelds, tablets, smartphones... who asked for a streaming tablet device? Nobody). Same with the 3DS (nobody said "our screens aren't immersive enough. Give us 3D!").

With the Switch Nintendo is back in "technology not yet good enough" land (motion controls and hybrid system) and the games cater to the mass market again. Gen 8 was Nintendo's worst generation and even now they have an install base approaching 75m units.

People make the mistake of looking at Wii U sales and then using them as an anchor to predict Switch sales. This is called an "anchoring effect" and it is shown to be one of the big logical mistakes humans make when making predictions. It's fascinating, go look it up! In reality, the gaming market has huge volatility: Console makers went from 25 to 75m (Microsoft), 22 to 100m (Nintendo), 150 to 80m (Sony) in gen 7 and then from 100m to 13m (Nintendo) and from 80 to 15m (Sony handhelds). Also, people totally forget about the 3DS which will sell more than 70m units lifetime.

So again: It's possible the Switch will hit Wii numbers.