Before The Switch Launched, What was your sales prediction for the Switch?

[Illusion]

I was hoping for 60 million, maybe at best the 3DS + Wii U numbers and I can say that I probably wouldn't have made any bets on those sales figures as the general consensus was that the Switch would not even reach those levels.

1. The Wii U was a complete flop and people were not sure about the Switch because it didn't have a gimmick like Nintendo's recent successes had used (dual screens, 3D effect or WiiMote). Nintendo hadn't made a successful hardcore gaming console since the SNES and nobody was thinking that Nintendo should try to compete against Sony/Microsoft for that turf again. The fusion concept was fairly novel, but Nintendo had tried something similar with the Wii U Gamepad and it wasn't clear that Nintendo could produce something sleek and cool enough for people to want to carry in their pockets alongside their IPhones. Also, nobody expected the Switch to be a capable home console that could actually produce equally impressive graphics as a portable unit and would actually end up being the system of choice for hardcore gamers. Everybody thought that it would have to dock on a pedestal to achieve decent graphics and that as a portable unit it wouldn't be that much further ahead of the 3DS, meaning that either the home console mode (more likely) or the portable mode would come across as an afterthought that would get abandoned over time.
2. The 3DS was losing steam very quickly to smartphone gaming. At the time, it appeared that smartphone gaming was the future for portable gaming. The hybrid concept was thought to be Nintendo's only hope to make a handheld system relevant in 2017. Nobody predicted that smartphone gaming was more of a fad and that the ball would return to Nintendo's court the way it has.
3. The impact of Nintendo's 2017 launch lineup. Nobody thought that BotW would be as incredible as it turned out to be. Nintendo's last few Zelda releases (Skyward Sword, Twilight Princess) were basically letdowns and Nintendo hadn't made a truly groundbreaking Zelda game since Ocarina of Time. When people saw Miyamoto playing BotW (Zelda U) in 2014, there were complaints that the game environment looked empty and that there wouldn't be much to do. Apartment from that one brief demo and a few teasers, there was very little information on BotW prior to the Switch and it was being marketed as a Wii U exclusive right up until the Switch's launch window. Making BotW multiplatform was seen as a cop-out by fans and people really weren't thinking about just how revolutionary this game would be for Nintendo and the industry at large. It's not an exaggeration to say that BotW is possibly the greatest game ever made and is one of the most transformative for the industry.
3. Nobody expected that Nintendo games would become the new cool with the general public in 2020 like it has. The Switch has gone from being a 80-100 million lifetime seller as it sat last year to being 150-200 million selling console this year and possibly the most successful gaming hardware ever released. Nobody saw a virus and a massive lockdown coming in 2020 that would turn society off the mature, Hollywood style zombie/shooter games and back to the carefree innocence of the Mushroom Kingdom that made Nintendo huge in the 80's.

And just speaking from memory, I guarantee that the consensus was that the Switch would likely sell considerably less than the 3DS + Wii U and that Nintendo would have to go third party sometime in this generation. There is no way that the average member on this site was predicting that the Switch would sell 80-100 million in 2016-early 2017. At the very least, successful predictions for the Switch were being kept very quiet prior to its launch. The vocal people were the ones saying that it would fail.