Year 1 - Week 52 - Global Switch Sales vs WiiU/XboxOne/3DS/PS4

[dharh]

RolStoppable said:

barneystinson69 said:

The XB1 was pacing with the PS4 till the end of its first holiday season. It then collapsed after that, and for a time was trailing the Wii U in weekly sales. Today its trailing 2:1 to the PS4 (though far better than at its worst moments). I know you're happy that the Switch is doing well now, but we cannot predict trends in a year or two. The Switch had Zelda to launch, which certainly helped. But once again, that doesn't mean momentum will last forever. 35 million is hardly a flop in my eyes, but I was expecting a decline due to a number of factors. If I am wrong, than so be it. But such a preidiction is reasonable, especially with the decline Nintendo HW has had since the 7th gen.

You can't predict anything, but I can.

Switch momentum is going to last because of big game releases throughout 2017. 2018 will have more big games, so momentum will improve because that's normal for year 2. What this means is that Switch will comfortably pass the 35m mark before 2020.

And no, predicting a severe decline is not reasonable when a company is set to do everything better than in the previous generation. Your Switch prediction was as reasonable as someone predicting that the Xbox One will comfortably outsell the PS4 in North America on the basis of Microsoft's gains and Sony's losses in the seventh generation. Anyone who bothered to look at the Xbox One could tell that it was going to lose. A new generation means that things start at 0 again, and Microsoft's original vision for the Xbox One was absolutely terrible. When it was time to evaluate Switch, many people thought "Wii U did bad, therefore Switch is going to be the same" despite video game history already providing us with a Nintendo example: The Wii didn't follow the trajectory of the GameCube.

Bolded:  That is absolutely not correct.  Previous gen _does_ absolultey factor into the next gen.  How much of an impact it has, how good/bad the new product is going against previous gen sentiment may vary, but you can't discount people being burned/rewarded from a previous generation deciding to wait/skip or buy a next gen despite the performance.  

By most measures the PS3 launch was horrendous, yet the turn around kept all three console of that gen within 20%.  I'm not ready to say by how much the Switch is being stunted by the abysmal performance of the Wii U, especially given the piss poor ability of Nintendo to make enough Switches, but I will without a doubt say that it has had an effect (even if it would be only 1%), myself included.  You can't claim me a Nintendo hater to prove my sentiment invalid.