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Helloplite on 03 April 2017
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Alby_da_Wolf said:
Helloplite said:
Nothing less than 120 million will justify the decision to merge handheld and home console form factors.

You ask for too much, in the current situation it simply needs three things to be justified:

1) lifetime overall HW + SW profit > 3DS and Wii U combined
2) HW sales > 3DS and Wii U combined
3) SW sales > 3DS and Wii U combined

People considering money and nothing else could think condition 1 would be enough, but points 2 and 3 are of the essence too, as they mean market relevance and brand recognition, they justify 1st party games development and they attract 3rd party devs too.

Anyhow, considering how much 3DS can still sell if they don't kill it abruptly, this still means that Switch should sell at least 90M lifetime to become a real success. Ninty can financially afford lower sales, as long as it's profitable, but it would lose market share and relevance and plummet again into the gray and dull situation it was suffering just before Wii and DS.

Wii and DS combined sold over 250 million. Wii U and 3DS sold 78 million (let's say 80 million minimum by the time the generation ends). Given that Wii U was a dud, and the fact that PSP and Vita combined sold over 90 million (and it is unlikely there will be another competitor for the same space this time around), it really is not unreasonable to expect 120 million. Remember that there was a lot of overlap of users in Nintendo platforms (e.g. people with both DS and Wii, Wii U and 3DS) which will no longer be possible. Anything less than 120 million and Nintendo will end up cannibalising its own marketshare.

I am not saying that Nintendo should (or will) go back to the glory days of Wii + DS. The 250+ million ship has really sailed.

But expecting half that, in a market without a direct competitor, with a platform that merges both your form factors, is really not unreasonable.

I am not saying it will sell 120 million by the way. I feel it will get stuck at the 60-80 million range -- and that, in the long term, is not good news for Nintendo.