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

[Pyro as Bill]

IcaroRibeiro said:

Ninty 64, probably their biggest failure as console maker, it was their defeat on read ocean market and ultimately opened a market for Sony become a stronghold on home console market they preserved til today

After N64 Nintendo needed to revise their strategy every generation because they can't be sucessful anymore competing in the same market space with Sony as proved with Game Cube. When Nintendo hardware and games are attractive besides Sony they succeeds (Wii, Switch), when not they bomb (Game Cube, Wii U). I'm general I see Nintendo position on home console market as much more complex than both Microsoft and Sony and their sales floating so much between generations shows that

Switch in other hand is correcting this problem consolidating Nintendo into a new hybrid business model. On handheld market Nintendo was always absolute, so as long they keep releasing hybrids I'm sure they will not ever have a flop like GC or Wii U again 

Soundwave said:

I mean they went from 95% marketshare with the NES/Famicom down to like 60% with the SNES and then eventually into a total tail spin ending up around 11% by the time the GameCube ended its run ... that's a pretty whopping drop.

The 3DS selling only half of the DS is still a pretty large dud, the XBox One is going to sell about half the XBox 360 ... you see any XBox fanboys really cheering that as a big success? If the PS5 sells only 65 million units, about half of what the PS4 should finish around, you can bet your ass a lot of people were term that a big disappointment. PS5 needs to sell a minimum of 90 million units I would say and a even flat 90 would be a bit of a disappointment. 

Losing 80+ million customers from one cycle to another is never a good thing, especially when the 3DS required a massive panic price cut that led Nintendo to lose a lot of money. Almost every time Nintendo's had a huge success (NES, Wii, Game Boy, DS) the successor has sold notably less, in some cases disastrously less, the GBA being probably the sole exception there though since it had its lifecycle cut short prematurely it's not as well remembered.  

So sure that's probably where that reputation of having doubts about Nintendo's ability to transition success from one generation to another comes from. You can claim its unfair, but you can't really control other people's opinions. If you're someone who claims loudly they're never late, but you're actually late half the time, you can't really sit there and throw a fit when people maybe make a joke about your punctuality. 

Or if a hockey player scores 100 points one season, and then only 50 the next season or a basketball player goes from averaging 25 points per game to only 13 points per game, people are going to ask what's up with the drop, even if 50 points or 13 ppg is still OK for a lot of players. If the iPhone starts to sell half of what it used to sell, that would be a big story. That's just how the world works. 

SNES dropped ~20% from NES then N64 and GC dropped another ~33% each. It's a gradual, continued decline due to Nintendo following the conventional 'more graphics/bigger games' philosophy. None of them are 'huge mistakes after massive successes'.

Whatever measure you use for 3DS, it does infinitely better than the PSV and the PSV's successor. Had Nintendo put out a lower end system like DS then it might have left a bigger opening for PSV given the conventional thinking was that smartphones will swallow up the handheld cazualz like they did with Wii.

Nintendo went to great lengths to explain in detail what their strategy was for Wii and DS and why they expected it to be successful and copied. Putting it down to luck/a fluke/lightening in a bottle alongside NES, GB and Switch is ridiculous.