By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
javi741 on 21 February 2020
Edit Thread
Shadow1980 said:
The_Liquid_Laser said:

The main problem with this argument is that you can compare the DS to the first three years of the PS2 and get a similar story.  

Data has not yet shown when Switch will peak.  If we are going by sales so far this year, Switch has not peaked yet comparing YoY Jan-Feb sales to last year (worldwide).  Data has also not given us an indication yet of what Switch's legs will be like.  Going by data alone is going to give an incomplete picture.

On the other hand we can measure market size.  If you combine all of the handheld gamers and all of the home gamers, then that is a huge potential market for Switch.  It only needs to sell to about 55% of that market in order to beat the DS.  On top of that the home version is actually more popular than the Lite version.  Home gamers are going for Switch in a big way and handheld gamers love it too.  Switch has a lot more growth potential than even the DS had.

That is why saying the Switch can't possibly outsell the DS is calling this way too early.  

What's the PS2 have to do with this?

In any case, we can look at older systems to look at trends to see when a system experiencing a period of growth might pass its peak and enter its decline phase (note: the N64 and 3DS were omitted from these charts because they peaked within their first year).

Except for the GameCube (for reasons I'll explain in a bit), every Nintendo system had a period of at least a few quarters where they experienced year-over-year growth (with the DS it was 14 straight quarters of YoY growth, the best such streak for any system ever), but that growth slowed and eventually flipped over into YoY declines. At no point in any Nintendo system released in the past 20 years have we seen a Nintendo system experience a period of growth, then some declines, and then another multi-quarter period of significant growth. It just doesn't happen. Once we see two or three quarters of YoY declines, that has always heralded the start of the terminal decline phase of a Nintendo system's life.

The GameCube was an odd duck because it had a price cut very early that gave a good boost to Q2 sales, but that had petered out, hence the YoY declines in Q2 & Q3 2003. Then it had another price cut in Sept. 2003 that gave Q4 that year a big boost, but that boost was even shorter-lived that the boost caused by the price cut.


Going back to the Switch, we can see that it already has had five straight quarters of growth. Except for a brief reversal in Q3 2019 (thanks to the release of the Lite), we've seen a general downward trend in the amount of YoY growth. While we don't have actual numbers yet, the Switch is known to be down already in January, only its second month where it was down YoY since Nov. 2018 (the other month was July 2019). Now, January could just be statistical noise, or it could be a result of Jan. 2019 having gotten a residual boost from Smash. It's possible that February and March could make up for it by being up YoY. I already admitted in my previous post that it's still too early in the year to tell for sure if the Switch is post-peak or not.

However, we do know the following two facts:

1) The Switch's YoY increases have been declining and, regardless of the reasons, Nintendo systems experiencing a multi-quarter growth period see said growth slow and then flip over into YoY declines, which initiates the post-peak period of the system's life.

2) The Switch's YoY increases have not been of the same magnitude of growth that the DS experienced. It's not even close. They're not even in the same league as the Wii's YoY increases during its growth period. They're more in line with those of the GBA.

Based on these facts, I simply do not see a multi-year increase in Switch sales in the cards (there's also no precedent for a multi-year period of flat-sales for Nintendo systems). And without rapid growth over the next two years, that gap between the Switch and the DS will grow and fast. Is it possible that we could see continued and significant growth out of the Switch? Yes. Is it likely? No. Could it potentially meet or beat the DS? Not a chance.

And as for the total size of the market, that's such a nebulous quantity as to be useless. After three generations, we can surmise that the total combined global market for PlayStation & Xbox is in the 170-180M range, something that's been pretty damn consistent so far (even the final WW total for combined PS4+XBO sales will likely end up in that range). But when it comes to Nintendo, they've been highly volatile. They went from the GameCube (bad sales) to the Wii (good sales) to the Wii U (bad sales) and now to the Switch (good sales). Even their handhelds have not shown much consistency. And this is all before taking into account regional differences in sales. And counting the home console and old handheld market separately is even less useful. We have only a vague idea what the overlap between Nintendo home console owners and PS/Xbox owners are, and we have even less of an idea what the overlap between what, say, Wii and DS owners were, or DS owners and PS/Xbox owners.

We have no idea that Nintendo's total potential market size is, and it really doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is what the sales data says, and as more time passes we'll start to get an ever more clear picture of what the Switch's trajectory will be.

http://www.vgchartz.com/article/442508/year-on-year-sales-amp-market-share-charts-february-15-2020/

Here is an article on the year-on-year sales of the Switch. I calculated it and in 2019 YoY covering the same time period, Switch's sales grew 17%. In 2020 however Switch's sales grew 21% YoY over the same time period despite having a weak Jan-Feb so far, which shows that the Switch is still growing globally in sales.