Switch: a multi-wave console lifecycle (prediction)

[curl-6]

Soundwave said:

curl-6 said:

2022 is the absolute earliest Switch 2 should come out, but 2023 would be better.

Switch's audience will not be chomping at the bit for a successor in the next 18 months. It's simply too soon.

There are dangers to premature replacement, you risk both losing millions of potential sales for the system being replaced and misfiring its successor's launch because the audience isn't ready.

The flipside to that though is you can lose momentum in a blink of an eye in this business if you are too slow/lackadasical in your transition. 

Nintendo in particular has had this problem really multiple times, going back famously to even their first hardware transition, Hiroshi Yamauchi was so angry with the Genesis going from a joke circa late 1989/1990 to eating a large chunk of the SNES' market share in the West that he publically slammed his own son-in-law (Mr. Arakawa) to the press, lol, which is a huge embarrassment in Japanese business culture. 

You can go very quickly from top of the world to "oh shit, what's happening". It even happened to Sony, they must have thought they'd entered some weird Twilight Zone circa early 2007 whereas 12 months prior they weren't even close to being challenged by anyone. 

2022/2023 wouldn't be a "slow" transition though, that's a normal 5-6 year cycle. 

All they'd need to do is plan the next 3 years well and make sure Switch 2 launches with killer software like Mario Kart 9 and Splatoon 3 in its first year.