Will the Nintendo Switch overtake the PS4 in terms of sales worldwide?

[hunter_alien]

Bofferbrauer2 said:

hunter_alien said:

Well that was the 3DS as well and the system barely chugged along in it's last 2 viable years, and in all honestly, that was mostly on the Pokemon hype that was created with Pokemon Go!

The Switch is in the middle of its lifecycle. We have already seen that price cuts don't necessarily affect Nintendo products in the same way as they do other systems, hence why the 2DS or GC for that matter never really took off. I am fully expecting it to double these numbers LT, but I honestly doubt the 2nd generation franchise titles will push as many systems as the 1st gen titles, for the simple fact that most people who wanted them will have one already. 

Of course, only time will tell how this will all play out, but it sure reminds me of the hype the Wii had, and how many people were expecting it to easily break the 200 million mark. At the end of the day, I have only to win on this, as a Switch owner, so I hope that it will have a massive install base and as much support as it can possibly get. 

https://www.vgchartz.com/article/444458/switch-vs-3ds-sales-comparisonswitch-lead-continues-to-grow-in-june-2020/

Switch already leads the 3DS by 16M, and advantage that is growing very fast. By end of the Year the Switch should lead by about 25M and come very close to the 3DS's total sales figures.

The reason why the 3DS crashed and burned so early was because it needed a massive pricecut to get off the ground, which in turn meant that Nintendo didn't have much leverage left in terms of pricecuts later down the road. The 3DS still got cheaper, but the differences were so small that it was barely felt by the consumers and thus had very limited effect, just enough for making sure the sales numbers didn't drop too fast. These are all things that are not true for the Switch.

The 2DS was hideous and lacked the additional power of the then-already released New 3DS. Of course it didn't do well like that. Had Nintendo released the new 2DS XL alongside or shortly after the new 3DS XL and not bothered with the original 2DS, I'm pretty sure it could have had much more of an impact on the 3DS sales than it did.

GC pricecut didn't work because at the time Nintendo still tried to compete with Sony head-on, and against the PS2 at that. That simply couldn't work with the image it had despite doing everything they could to change the image by buying exclusivity deals with many mature games, only for them to rather pay the fine for breach of contract than to linger around on the unsuccessful Gamecube.

Long story short, you just can't compare their situation with pricecuts to the one the Switch is in.

Yeah, you are probably right about this. The situation is not fully comparable, though all that we can do with historic data is to draw parallels Still the Switch needs to do 75 million more units from this point on to clearly outsell what the PS4 will do LT, and honestly I am still highly skeptical about that. That's the entire LT sales of the 3DS after all and that on an already very impressive 60 million install base to boot. But man, can you imagine how many awesome games will we get if it ends up doing 140 million units and gets support for like 8 years?