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. |
WiiU started with launch hype and holidays. But directly after that it dropped in early January into levels that made clear WiiU was in trouble. Switch also had strong launch and holidays. But between it had more than a half year to establish it's momentum. And it showed it has good momentum. So we can clearly conclude Switch is not a dud like WiiU. See momentum is best seen outside of launch, holidays and big game releases. Switch had already this periods. For WiiU it was seen in January after launch. The momentum is very different of the two. And basic momentum is hard to correct - in either direction. So a lukewarm year for Switch might slowly decrease momentum, but not a dramatic drop.
