Does Anybody Believe the NSW can sell around 150mil lifetime?

[Pyro as Bill]

RolStoppable said:

Soundwave said:

Sony's console business is doing great, like you're going to argue that with a straight face? lol. Good luck with that. 

The DS had two 30+ million selling years, that basically means it wipes out two of the Switch's 20 million years and throws another 20 million gap onto the Switch from those two years alone. That gap has to be made up and that's pretty tough.

That means very late in its product cycle, when its much harder its basically going to have to make up for a 20-30 million unit gap which isn't going to be easy. It's easier to make up ground when a platform is younger, asking it to do it in the back years is likely asking an 70 year old to bench press something that would be difficult for a 28 year old, its asking for a lot. 

No one knows if that can happen so claiming definitively is pointless. At year 3 not many would've guessed the Wii would crater the way it did, even the 3DS decline in year 4 was odd because it's not like they didn't release good games. It got Smash Brothers + Pokemon Ruby Sapphire Omega Alpha + New 3DS revision and yet sales went down notably from the level of the previous 3 years which shouldn't have happened.

Read what I said instead of coming up with a straw man argument. Nintendo's console business is doing better than Sony's and it's easy to back that up. For one, Sony had to exit the market for portable consoles which in turn ceded a monopoly to Nintendo. And two, Switch is outperforming the PS4 in profits when launch-aligned.

There's not much of a point in bringing up the Wii and 3DS again and again. Switch is 38 months old and at the same point in time it was crystal clear that the Wii wouldn't get respectable third party support for the remainder of its life, plus its sales had be trending downwards for about a year. At the same point in time the 3DS had been repeatedly aided by price cuts and revisions - a big sign for a troubled platform - and 2014 was the year where Nintendo's top development teams were focused on Wii U software; SSB for the 3DS isn't particularly impactful when the majority of gamers who buy hardware to play SSB do it for the couch multiplayer on the big screen. Neither the Wii nor 3DS scenario apply in any way, shape or form to Switch, so really, what's the point in mentioning the Wii and 3DS again?

As for the sales comparison to the DS, I explained it before why Switch is going to have a longer tail than the DS due to the sheer necessity with a one console strategy. Likewise, the one console strategy also means that we can expect more 5m+ selling games to be released in the latter half of Switch's life than for any Nintendo console before it, simply because there will be more top development teams available to make Switch software. Whether said 5m+ sellers are new IPs, IPs yet to have a Switch installment, or sequels, they'll all move hardware.

So far Nintendo has operated their Switch business without hurry, leaving it up to the market to decide the shelf life of the console, unlike with the Wii and DS where they rushed out successors to beat their competitors to the market. Rushing out those successors made especially the Wii suffer which resulted in a poor first party release schedule in 2011 and 2012, followed by nothing at all in 2013. Most people put the cart before the horse and believe that a Wii successor had to happen in 2012 because of declining Wii sales, but the reason why Wii sales declined so fast was because Nintendo wanted to launch a successor in 2012 with no consideration for the actual demand of its customers. Many of the early Wii U games might as well have been Wii games, but Nintendo was hellbent on getting a new console out.

Switch is the first console in history that lasted a full three years without a price cut. It's also unique because it has a primary SKU (hybrid) and a secondary SKU (Lite) which complement each other, so it isn't hard for Nintendo to sell multiple Switch consoles to the same household. Nintendo says that they intend for Switch to have a long lifecycle, but words alone obviously mean nothing. What's important are their actions and up till now their actions have fully backed up their words. Switch has multiple price cuts, revisions and value-added bundles in combination with a healthy software pipeline ahead of it, that's why it is reasonable to expect a prolonged sales plateau instead of the rather quick decline you have proposed in your follow-up post.

All those paragraphs and detailed explanations are too complex.

If you can't sum up the console business with a simple sporting analogy then your analysis is probably wrong.