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Soundwave on 18 July 2019
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RolStoppable said:
Soundwave said:

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. 

The 3DS was a troubled platform since the beginning, so a comparison with it doesn't hold much merit when Switch is clearly not following the 3DS trajectory of sales.

I think you didn't read my post because I pointed out the monopoly in the handheld market and further revisions, plus price cuts. The handheld market is pretty big and Nintendo has it all to themselves. They can capitalize on that with cheaper hardware prices because the upcoming Switch Lite at $199 sits at the high end of typical handheld prices. That's why 2021 and 2022 are nothing to worry about.

Price cuts haven't really ever stopped declining/aging Nintendo hardware sales past a short term boost.

I don't think they have much interest in giving up the $300 price bracket either, they like the lucrative profit margins they get at that price point. The Lite model is basically a way for them to keep the base Switch at $300 for a long time, because if you're cheap/broke/8-years-old well then the Lite option is made for you. 

2021 and 2022 will be a challenge for them IMO but we'll see. 

Switch is doing better than 3DS but it's not like it's light years ahead either, the Switch is at 32.3 million as of end of January 2019, 3DS was at about 30 million at the same equivalent time point in its product cycle. The 3DS did actually have reasonably decent sales in its first 3 years or so outside of one poor 4-5 month stretch post launch, but it really hit a brick wall after about (again) for the fiscal year of 2014-2015 (March). 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 18 July 2019