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Soundwave on 18 July 2019
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RolStoppable said:
Soundwave said:

"Championing MS and Sony" lol, ok, jeezus can you any more corporate obsessed? These aren't religions or even sports teams. Who cares, I'm merely citing that mid-gen Pro style refreshes do provide mid-cycle sales boosts. Argue that if you want but you probably really can't. 

I would expect sales of Switch to be solid through 2020 as I expect BOTW2 + new 3D Mario to go with AC and Bayo 3, but "2021 is a given no matter what" yeah ... no, not sure if I'm buying that kool-aid. 

By 2021, they'll likely have used up every major IP they have and even doubled down on IPs like 3D Zelda and 3D Mario. 

I think that's where they will start to see some decline, 2020 is still in the 3 year range. 2021, 2022 are more problematic I think. 

Just sequel-izing IP that are already on the Switch and selling to a big chunk of the userbase isn't going to be the be-all answer, with BOTW2 for example a large portion of the people who would be buying it are going to naturally be some of the 12 million+ that are Zelda fans that already have the Switch for BOTW1. So each successive sequel your "hardware sales bump" diminishes. 

Quality isn't the only issue, BOTW is tremendous quality, that actually works against BOTW2 being as large of a system seller because BOTW is so good that it brings in so many people to begin with that the sequel doesn't have anywhere near as large of a net to cast to get new hardware buyers from. 

New IP can certainly do the trick but it's also like buying a lottery ticket, there's no guarantee whatsoever that your new IP is going to be a big hardware driving hit. 

The revisions that Nintendo does are usually more effective than what Sony and Microsoft do. The Xbox One X couldn't prevent the decline of the Microsoft console, let alone provide a boost to make 2018 have better sales than 2017. Given your post volume in this thread and how you posted, I am sure you totally expected a Switch Pro to come out of the WSJ rumor. Now that it's clear that there isn't a Pro, you speculate about developers being able to use a performance boost as if that would make any difference or had any importance.

The benefit of a single console for Nintendo is that their top development teams have the option to put out sequels to already present IPs or create new IPs, as opposed to before where neither of those things were feasible on a company-wide basis. On top of that, Switch holds a monopoly in the handheld market which will keep it relevant for years to come regardless of how successful the new Sony and Microsoft consoles are. Furthermore, there are plenty of options left for Nintendo in terms of price cuts and revisions, so a long lifespan for Switch with sales of 10m+ per calendar year for seven years or more isn't farfetched at all, rather it should be expected.

2020 isn't in the year 3 range. If you want to be overly technical, you can count January and February 2020 towards year 3, and you can count March 2020 if you use the measurement of full fiscal years. But April 2020 and onwards is year 4 any way you slice it, and that puts a significant majority of 2020 into year 4.

Did the New 3DS or 2DS cause a lasting boost in 3DS sales? Or even a YoY boost that was significant? No? Then it wasn't as effective from an actual statistical perspective. 

Yes Switch can have more Mario and Zelda etc. games on it because of unified development setup, I never claimed that to not be the case, the issue is by 2021, who really are you bringing in that's new when you already have 2-3 major representations of said IP on the system already?

The fact is by the end of 2020 they'll have used up basically all their major IP and even doubled up likely on several of them. You can sequelize more from there but you end up hitting a saturation point because the previous games sell so well that they already have brought in most of the audience that would buy a system for that IP so now you're kinda just selling to same people who already own the system. 

I don't think 2021 + 2022 being defacto smooth sailing is some unassailable opinion that can't be challenged. We will see how that goes for Nintendo if they decide to really not rely at all on any kind of serious hardware refresh. My guess is they will start to see fairly notable declines in hardware sales at that point if they do that. 

Which will be interesting to see how they react since in the past they always had two hardware lines to kind of mitigate the impact from the down cycle period of hardware generations.