| Shadow1980 said: @RolStoppable. I do agree that Animal Crossing would still be a strong system-seller even had COVID not been a thing. However, I don't think it could have pushed the Switch to anything significantly over 7M without the pandemic & stimulus to aid it. Comparing YoY and, perhaps most pertinently, month-over-month sales, it seems likely that the Switch would have sold something closer to 700k in March without the pandemic, assuming that AC itself didn't also benefit from the pandemic. That would still make AC one of the biggest system-sellers ever, maybe the biggest ever in the U.S. in absolute numerical terms (I'd have to go and recalculate everything for comparing it to other games), and that March would still have been one of the best non-holiday months ever in the U.S. April would have seen a big drop-off, though, but AC still could still have had some sort of residual effect, possibly propelling it to as much as 300k that month. Past that, we shouldn't have seen any measurable effect on sales from AC, given that system-sellers never have any impact past their second month (and most never past their first). So, we might have seen a net YoY gain of around 400k for that 2-month period. Had the Switch been on average flat over the remaining 10 months of the year, it could have gotten close to 7M. But had it experienced even a modest drop for those other 10 month, say 10%, it would have been down slightly for the whole year. There's a reason why most predictions had the Switch's 2020 sales being at best flat or slightly up from 2019. Nobody, and I mean nobody, expected it to sell 9 million. As for those "time limits" you refer to, Nintendo has a well-known habit of running on short generations, killing off even successful systems prematurely. Their home consoles have never lasted longer than 6 years before being replaced (unless you count the Famicom's run in Japan). The Wii could have lasted longer and had better legs had they not bailed on it in 2010-11 to put all their efforts into the Wii U. They released the DS when the GBA was still doing very well, which had the effect of completely sucking the wind out of the GBA's sails. They released the 3DS when the DS was doing even better than what the GBA was doing, which caused the DS's sales to decline rapidly from what was a very healthy baseline. While I would be pleasantly surprised if they didn't repeat themselves again with the Switch, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they did it again, because Nintendo is probably always going to do what Nintendoes (sorry, bad pun). If we don't start hearing rumblings of the Switch's successor (which I really think will be a "Switch 2"; same form factor, but with a generation leap in power) by early 2023, then and only then will I be inclined to think the Switch will be longer-lived than the norm for a Nintendo system. But realistically, I think the most likely target date for the Switch's successor will be November 2023, giving it about the same run as the DS had before it was replaced. Maybe March 2024 at the latest. |
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