Nintendo quarterly results May 7th 2020 - Switch: 55.77m, (21m for the FY) Animal Crossing: 11.77m

[The_Liquid_Laser]

Otter said:

The_Liquid_Laser said:

Sound reasoning attacks an argument and not a person.  That's why it matters what other people said.  I am defeating an argument and not a person.  If a different person gives the same bad argument, then it's still a bad argument.

You are defeating the argument that hardware and software have saturation points? I'm sure you believe in a saturation point even if you disagree with the when that actually arrives.

Otherwise your logic is that a console will not decline as long as established big franchises are released for it and it will continue selling peak levels forever & there is no ceiling on how many users a new pokemon game will attract.

If an early pokemon game sells 16m and a late gen pokemon with double the userbase sells another 16m, you can already start to do the math to understand that maybe a large portion of 16m for the latter release is repeat users and there is not exponential growth.

Ultimately stop focusing on what other people have said in 2018 and just say that you don't think 2020 will be the reach of that saturation point because X, Y, Z.  

I.e you think Nintendo will produce more games for very casual audiences and they will be immediate smashs hits in ways 1,2 Switch and Ring Fit wasn't.

(Switch sports, Switch pets)

Or you think a Remastered Mario collection will sell on nostalgia and attract people who were on the fence.

Or you think BOTW2 will be even bigger than 1 and attract new audiences.

Or you think unexpected Animal crossing level system sellers are to be expected on a yearly basis because it has apparently happened every year of the Switches life so far (games like Smash & Pokemon do not fit into this argument lmao)....

It's why at the very beginning when quoted for "parroting logic", I simply asked whether the person has an opinion. Obviously a saturation point lays ahead, meaningful discussing can be had about when we think they will arrive.

I'm very happy to talk about saturation points.  I wish more people would, because then it becomes obvious that, yes, Switch actually can keep selling.  Switch actually can have an extremely high saturation point, because it is selling to both home console gamers and handheld console gamers.  The potential market is much bigger than a traditional home console.  However, since this is the first hybrid console, we don't know in practice what the saturation point is yet.

How can we figure out the saturation point?  We need to know when the console peaks, that will be very roughly when we are at the half way point.  Aggregate video game sales approximate a logistic function (an "S curve").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function  

That link shows a math equation and graph, but in practice you get data and put a best fit curve onto it.  But basically the curve is shaped like an S, because the top represents total saturation.  Sales can't go past that.  The curve is growing at its fastest at the half way point.  This would be when game sales peak.  So if we know the peak, that will be when games sales are (approximately) half of saturation.

So the short version is that we need to know when the system will peak, and we can't really know that because it is the first hybrid system.  It's true that a system can't sell forever.  There is going to be inevitable diminishing returns past the point when a system peaks.  But the Switch hasn't peaked yet, so we don't really have a clue what it's saturation level is.  But saturation could be extremely high, because it is selling to both the home console market and the handheld console market.