How many Switch Nintendo can ship to China

[Mnementh]

The_Liquid_Laser said:

Mnementh said:

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.

I am not sure tarriffs are that important. Sure, they have in critical price points an influence. But more important is wealth distribution compared to the prices (tarriffs and all included). Mostly it also aren't the tarriffs as much as console (especiall Nintendo ones) aren't launched in all countries, so the ones available are imported that adds heavily to the price. As Switch is launched officially and is also produced in China I don't expect too hefty of price drives here. More importantly the relatively wealthy population of coastal cities cna probably cough up some more money if they want to play the device.

The bigger hindrance in my opinion is the chinese regulation on games. As games there has to fulfill many requirements and have to officially approved (by the way: as this is true for movie and series too this lead to differences in production of korean drama that also targets china, as it must be approved beforehand these series are produced completely beforehand instead of while the show is running). This probably means that the big amount of Indies can't come over (because nobody can handle this much), only selected games of big publishers. If that includes Nintendo evergreens though, I don't worry too much.