Why are Nintendo Switch sales peaking much later than other Nintendo consoles?

[Bofferbrauer2]

Shadow1980 said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Yes, many thought the Switch would be flat or even down. They did the same as you did in posts before: look back how the Nintendo consoles peaked early and extrapolated from there.

What they didn't look at were the sales during the first 2 months of 2020, during which the Switch was outselling 2019 by a comfortable margin already, leading by over 250k after only 7 weeks. Of course, nobody expected AC:NH to become such a juggernaut, but the signs that the sales would be up in 2020 without Covid are all there already before the shit hit the fan.

Of course Covid helped; I mean, many who suddenly lost their job or had much more time at hand needed something to keep occupied (that's mainly why it's resistant to crisis), but pinning most of the rise on Covid is just wrong. Switch would have sold 24M+ even without the pandemic the way the things were going, and would probably have had a bigger holiday title without the virus delaying so much in terms of game development.

The Switch was down in Jan. & Feb. in the U.S., and perhaps also in Europe. It was only clearly up in Japan, likely due to the residual effects of the Lite (see my post above).

AC was going to be a system-seller, but nearly all of its effects would have been felt in March. Aside from maybe the Wii U improving in 2015 in the months following Splatoon's release, there's no good evidence that a single game can cause an increase in baseline sales lasting for months on end, and certainly nothing like a 100% increase.

Nothing ever experiences growth like what we saw without some kind of major stimulative factor. Only price cuts and new models have ever been able to do what we saw. Since there was no price cut and the Lite wasn't enough to explain the growth, and there's no way AC could have done that by itself, the pandemic had to be the cause of the overwhelming amount of the growth we've seen. Data for the PS4 & XBO corroborate the impact the pandemic had on hardware sales.

The data suggests that, absent the pandemic, the Switch would have been at best slightly up in 2021. It wouldn't have sold anywhere close to what it did in 2020 had COVID never been a thing.

Again, you just look at US and deduce that all the rest of the world follows the same pattern.

Switch was down in the US due to not having the tail end of the SMP/PLG/Smash  triplet like 2019 had, and the fact that NSMBUD in 2019 was clearly a bigger January title from Nintendo than Tokio Mirage Sessions in 2020, which boosted January and February sales in the US in 2019. Outside of the US though, these game releases that pushed 2019 were not big enough to keep up with the increased baseline that 2020 already had before Covid and before Animal Crossing. As a result you're fooling yourself with your own data by being too selective and just looking at a snippet, looing the big picture in the process.

Also, Nintendo hold back quite some consoles for the AC:NH launch, considering it resulted in 1M sales within a month in NA alone, which combined with the shutdown of production facilities in China due to covid resulted in short supply throughout mid-to-late February. Considering how small the drop YoY was, had those factories not been affected, Switch would certainly have been up in February 2020 compared to 2019.