| RolStoppable said: I'll try to trim the fat of this discussion some more to focus on the core again. I don't think home-only or handheld-only revisions are likely, but things like a different size or improved battery life are proven methods to shift more hardware; the main point about revisions is that they are very realistic to happen, what they are going to be will depend on what Nintendo views as desired features by the broader market. But back to the core of this bloated discussion: How can Switch grow beyond 40m units. You still assume that sequels won't be able to keep the system going, but we can look at the 3DS which was almost completely devoid of new Nintendo IPs that made a meaningful impact. The 3DS has already sold more than 65m and is bound to go beyond the 70m mark. By the end of 2013 (close to three full years on the market) it had essentially all of the established IPs it was going to get. In the following years it got more installments of already present IPs while the few new IPs didn't gain any traction. But despite all of that, the 3DS kept selling and improved from ~40m to what will eventually be over 70m. Basically, the 3DS is a practical example of a console that is close to the worst case scenario. Perhaps you are looking at this in the wrong way. Maybe you think "how can Switch peak in year 5 or 6" and that makes you go off the rails. I don't think of such an unusual sales curve. If I look at Switch's current sales pace and use very round and rather modest numbers for argument's sake, then I get something like this for calendar years: 2017 - 10m Switch has sold through over 4m units by the end of June, so 10m in 2017 isn't a bold estimate. Sales of successful systems always increase in year 2 while year 3 is good as well. At that point Switch has already 40m. The three years afterwards mimic the 3DS scenario: Nintendo fails to put out successful new IPs, but the back catalogue and sequels to established IPs still sustain sales. That's why it's strange to see people doubting if Switch can sell more than 50m units lifetime. Once you factor in that Switch has a very positive market reception while the 3DS had to battle against a negative reaction throughout its entire life, the numbers listed above seem really low. Some terrible things would have to happen to drag down Switch to 3DS levels. |
I'm not sure different size alone is a proven method to shift more hardware when we haven't seen the effect independent of price drops ... (that ties in to my point of this generation having a tighter cost structure, Nintendo owes more credit to advances in transistor technology than it does)
The 3DS had lot's of things to soften the blow in the presence of no new Nintendo IPs such as dormant IPs (Luigi's Mansion and Kid Icarus), adapting IPs that originally came from consoles (Smash Bros and Donkey Kong Country Returns), emerging third party IPs (Monster Hunter, Yokai Watch and Bravely default) and IPs that grew (Tomodachi Life and Fire Emblem) ... (not only did I doubt Switch's monopoly advantage to begin with but Nintendo already grew at the expense of Sony with the 3DS and there's less chances than ever for new high quality third party IPs to emerge with the Switch's higher development costs)
Then we have other issues such as Nintendo's demographic of aging customers who might very well one day grow apart from Nintendo but despite all the bashing of very young people around these boards Sony is not blind enough to not try to appeal to the parents of those people who may very well one day grow up with dispoable income to buy their new systems. One very obvious thing is that Nintendo needs to appeal to a broader demographic beyond the older males or they could face the risk of failing to grow or worse yet face a decline and Nintendo needs to try rectifying that with the Switch much like they did with the WII/DS ...
I'm not expecting the Switch to peak at it's 4th or 5th year, what I want to know is if the Switch can 'maintain' or 'hold' a high volume of hardware sales in those years ... (It sounds pretty realistic for the Switch to be able to maintain high volume throughout the 4th year from the backlog of games from the previous 3 years but then what ?)
FWIW, I think there's an 85% chance of the Switch passing 50M units so far but there's quite a bit of uncertainty with the Switch hitting 60M units and even more uncertainty with 65M units but if the IPs grow this gen then it can change overtime ...
While the 3DS did get negative reception initially, I've also learned that consumers can be forgiving as seen with the 3DS a year later on and the same goes relatively for the PS4 in Japan ... (I can't forsee the Switch having the price advantage like the 3DS did either.)
