How many Switch Nintendo can ship to China

[The_Liquid_Laser]

Mnementh said:

The_Liquid_Laser said:
I've got no sense for China. I'm still waiting to find out more about how China will receive an actual console. It could be almost nothing, or it could be a huge ton. My biggest skepticism about China has to do with supply though. Nintendo is about to have trouble supplying the places where it is well established. I am not sure how they can supply China at the same time. It might just make Nintendo even more short supplied.

In the end, I still think Switch total sales will surpass PS2 even before China is taken into account. After adding in China who knows? It might be a drop in the bucket or it might double their total sales. I need to see how Nintendo is received there before I can decide.

Well, I wager a guess. China has about 1.3 billion people, but still a lot of them in rural regions are poor. But in the coastal cities in the east many people are decently wealthy and adopt a western lifestyle. I guess that is about 300 million people - about as big as the US.

What is more, so far they had no real spark reagrding consoles. Many chinese play on PC or phone, but console is not very common yet. I would say the situation is not unlikely like in the US at the first to third gen. The NES sold about 30 million, the Atari 2600 about 20 million. Other devices sold less. I think therefore, 30M is the upper limit. The lower limit I would set at about 10M, as Tencent sure as hell will market this thing and the novelty that Switch can be used docked and as handheld will help. So 10M-30M. No game changer, but not a drop in the bucket either.

That is some decent reasoning there, but when the Atari launched the US population was closer to 200m.  But the range sounds about right 10m - 30m. 

However another thing I am not sure of is the laws about consoles in China.  I know in some other countries have high tarriffs and such on consoles, and that prevents them from selling too much there.  I don't know if there are Chinese laws that would prevent consoles from becoming popular.

Amnesia said:
Shame, I wish I had more votes here, but the tendency seems to go for a 6-8 millions for China.
I also had an hypothesis, feel free to answer with agressivity this time if you think it deserves it but at least I will know if my thought are coherent or not.
I always believed that the XBOX1 was performing poorly in Japan, because many japanese did not want to buy the console from the console maker from the country who destroyed them in 1945... Will the Chinese people be attracted from the console maker, from the country who considered them as "slave stock" for centuries ?

The Japanese only play Japanese video games for the same reason why Americans only watch American movies.  Once you understand why Americans only like American movies, then it's pretty easy to understand why Japanese only like Japanese games.