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JWeinCom on 06 November 2021
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Shadow1980 said:

At the time, the idea that the Switch might not hit 100M seemed perfectly reasonable. Nintendo's Gen 7 successes seemed like flukes, considering they didn't replicate them with the Wii U & 3DS. Also, this was 2017, when the Switch was only a few months old, long before certain unforeseen circumstances-that-we're-not-going-to-discuss propelled it to new and unexpected heights. Back in mid 2017, hardly anyone though the Switch would outsell not just the Wii by a comfortable margin, but the PS4 as well. The Switch wasn't selling anywhere close to Wii-level numbers in the U.S., and though it was doing better than any other Nintendo home system in Japan, it was about on par with the 3DS. Given those observations, sub-100M sales was a very plausible estimate for someone to make.

Still, 50M seems really pessimistic considering that the Switch was doing good enough in 2017 to where 70M or so would seem a reasonable lower-end projection. It was still doing at least 3DS-level sales, so it seems a stretch to think the Switch would sell considerably less than the 3DS. The oldest prediction of mine I could find was in May 2017, where I thought it could "potentially" reach 90-95M.

Pachter's prediction reminds me the analysts who back in 2007-08 predicted the 360 would stagnate and end up selling less than 50M lifetime while the PS3 would blow past it and eventually become the #1 system of Gen 7. Such a prediction might have made sense back in 2005 before Gen 7 was underway, but not so much when were were already well into that generation and the 360 was doing very well for itself, especially in North America, while the PS3 saw Sony lose a lot of market share. Someone actually parodied those projections like so:

To be honest, I probably wouldn't have thought the Switch would sell 100 million at that point either. The key difference though is that nobody is paying me to give my projections, and websites take no notice when I make one.