RolStoppable said:
Before spring 2017 I wasn't sure if Switch would get embraced by the market right away. I was expecting Switch to sell more than 100m lifetime for sure, with a first year that wouldn't constitute more than a solid start, then gaining better traction from the second year onwards. That's when I expected Nintendo's value proposition to be fully understood, that Switch was a home console/handheld hybrid and Nintendo's only console going forward, resulting in a much stronger and more robust software library than pretty much every Nintendo console before it. But in April 2017 Switch had shortages, so the initial demand was much higher than I had expected. The launch phase was already over, but demand remained high which strongly suggested that Switch was going to sell strong throughout its first year already. There wasn't any good reason in my mind why Switch would be notably behind the PS4 after the first year, so it wouldn't have to catch up later on like I initially believed. The potential to catch up in case of an early deficit was always there because Switch could dip into two markets and therefore peak higher than the PS4. But if Switch keeps up with the PS4 from the beginning, then its potential for a higher peak was bound to make it pull away eventually. I am not a believer in conventional wisdom, in this case the supposed long tails of Sony consoles and supposed early peaks of Nintendo consoles followed by quick declines. The DS had a sustained peak and while others are going to brush that off as an anomaly for a Nintendo system, I rather look for a logical reason why the DS sold the way it did. The health of a software pipeline is a huge factor and the DS had a good one; it had no AAA third party support, but it had a high frequency of good third party releases nonetheless. Applying the fundamental reasoning of a healthy software pipeline to consoles of all manufacturers, you get a high level of consistency for both high- and low-selling consoles, including their sales curves with prolonged peaks or fast declines. So it was never something Nintendo or Sony specific that determined sales curves. Once you understand that, you just need to look at Switch and examine if its software pipeline will be healthy or not. Being Nintendo's only console, it was bound to get all Nintendo games which is already a big plus. Sony's exit from the handheld market left Nintendo with a monopoly in that space, so that alone was bound to garner third party interest because portable console gaming has made money since the original Game Boy; a game merely being portable constituted a selling point in the past, so that's an opportunity for low investments with good to great returns; and boy, did Switch get a lot of ports from third parties. The third big factor is the Japanese market where Microsoft is virtually irrelevant and Sony on a notable downward trend; an incentive for domestic third parties to give more consideration to Nintendo. Sum it all up and it's highly probable that Switch will get a ton of games throughout its life. That's why I was confident about Switch's lifetime sales and also about its sales curve. It was so common to see people assume that Switch will peak in year 2, but it never made sense to believe that. Today we already know that Switch didn't peak in year 3 either and that means most previous Nintendo consoles have no use for comparisons with Switch anymore. The DS remains useful. There are still people who believe that Switch sales will decline sharply, but looking at its software pipeline makes that very, very doubtful. Year 4 will likely be Switch's peak year because of how high it will be already, but that doesn't mean we are in for a massive decline over the next couple of years. A sustained peak is much more likely, especially because the most basic means to sustain sales (price cuts and revisions) have been barely used for Switch at this point. That got a bit long, but no point in trimming down this post now. It is what it is. |
That's a good explanation! If the Switch's success taught me anything it's how wrong gamers can be about stuff like this. That neogaf thread back in January 2017 full of people predicting that it's gonna flop keeps getting better and better to look back on. I did buy into the conventional wisdom about it and thought it wasn't gonna do that well but after spending a lot of time here I understand how this stuff works at least decently well now.
