nemo37 said:
I will say this though, they do have a habit of either seriously underestimating themselves (Switch first year; Wii early days) or over-estimating themselves (Overproducing Gamecube, Wii U's first year expectations, some mid-life 3DS projections). If you remember Nintendo planned to ship 10 million Wii U units from April 2013 - March 2014. They wanted to do this with a combination of NSMBU + Luigi, Monster Hunter Tri, Lego City Undercover, Pikmin 3, Wii Fit U, Wind Waker HD, Super Mario 3D World. Suffice to say none of that helped and the system ended up selling 2.72 million units for the entire year (the November + December launch in 2012 resulted in them moving more units, 3.06 million, than they did in the entire following year). This sort of dramatic momentum shift in a matter of a few months combined with Nintendo's, sometimes, over optimistic assumptions regarding their products and brand is what makes their own targets somewhat unreliable in my view. This dramatic downturn in momentum for Wii U in such a short period of time is also partially why I am skeptical when people come out and say that just because the Switch had a strong first year, the second year would also be strong or stronger. They do not look at cases like Wii U, where things went very sour very quickly (and same could happen here with Switch, particularly since its installbase is still low, and especially if Nintendo doesn't constantly bring their A game). They cannot overestimate themselves again like they did with Wii U. |
You do have to remember, though, that there were more issues with the Wii U at the time. There were huge droughts (first and third party), little to no advertisement (even some of the bigger games had not much advertisement), and the new, just-released consoles (the PS4 and Xbone) completely took all the attention from the Wii U in market presence and sales.
