Nintendo quarterly sales update (Switch 61.44m, Animal Crossing 22.4m)

[The_Liquid_Laser]

Jumpin said:

Vodacixi said:

He was talking about how the Wii sales dropped at some point around 2009-2010 due to the lack of a strong first and third party support. He argued that, unlike the Wii, the Switch has a very good amount of games that will make the situation different, like new Pokémon games, BotW 2 and so on. 

Now, you can or cannot agree with that statement. But it's very clear to everyone except you what kind of Pokémon games he was refering to. Therefore, and this is why we are still discussing your nonesense, he has no need to clarify anything. The problem is yours, not his. 

And that's all I have to say about this. Have a nice day... 

But that's not true, the Wii continued to have strong software releases through 2009 and 2010 that sold millions to tens of millions of copies. software sales continued to maintain around peak levels throughout this period. In fact, the sales arc of the Wii up until the end of 2010 is the healthiest of all Nintendo's home console releases - the NES only appears a little healthier due to it taking about 6 years to widely release it (until about 89/90 even in countries where it was released it was still only available in certain cities) but it mostly peaked in markets in its 1st-3rd year after wide release.

While some decline took place in those years, in fiscal 2011 software sales were 171.26 million which is around a 15% drop from fiscal 2009's peak, not even close to alarming. Hardware sales had declined to 15.08 million, which was steeper, but not particularly bad - especially since calendar 2008 for the Wii was literally insane. October to December 2009 marked the highest software and highest hardware sales Wii ever experienced, also the highest revenue Nintendo ever recorded. It's not until fiscal 2012 that you see a disturbing drop, and much of that was manufactured by Nintendo in preparation for the Wii U: cutting down Wii marketing significantly, cutting off VC releases, Nintendo channels saw much less support, and Nintendo's own software releases declined sharply.

In fiscal 2012, Wii software sales drop from 171.26 million down to 102.37 million, and hardware sales drop from 15.08 million down to 9.84 million. Relatively speaking, 9.84 million hardware and 102.37 software is no slouch as it is comparable with the very best years of the NES and SNES, and SIGNIFICANTLY better than most non-Wii years of any of Nintendo's home consoles); that's comparable to Wii U's lifetime sales of 100 million software and 13.5 million hardware.

The Switch hybrid model is probably the best thing Nintendo has come up with. Not only has it reversed the downward trend of the dedicated console market, but it has the benefits of home console and handheld sales patterns: higher software penetration and higher hardware sales. These two things work together to make the Switch somewhat viral, a person might buy the Switch as a handheld for themselves, but then can easily share it as a home console with everyone else in their household. While in that household, other people might buy Switches of their own to use as personal handhelds. It's a totally different dynamic than anything seen before in video gaming. Today, it has a good shot at becoming Nintendo's most successful console of all time including Wii and DS.

While its true the Switch has a lot of third party games on the console, many of them are in the smaller creative genres that are typically outside of the mainstream. These sorts of games really began to take off on the DS and Wii before finding their way into the Steam and iOS ecosystems. The industry has changed a lot since 2006; the Wii and DS had a lot to do with it.

Since we are talking about my original argument, I'll chime it, because it has gotten to a game of telephone at this point.

Someone said that people are expecting Switch sales to drop fast like the Wii.  I said even if they dropped like the Wii, Switch would sell 133m.  Then I said that Switch would likely sell more than that, because all of the Wii's big sellers released in 2009 or earlier.  Switch on the other hand still has BotW 2 and 2 Pokemon games coming plus plenty of other first party titles for the next few years.  

At that point, the argument seemed to be what counts as a Pokemon game.  I definitely meant the mainline Pokemon games and not spinoffs like Pokemon Snap.  Mainline Pokemon games are going to sell better than anything the Wii released after 2009.  Basically, my argument is that Switch has guaranteed big selling titles for the second half of its life, while the Wii didn't have big selling titles of this caliber for the second half of its life.