The Road to 160m+ for Nintendo Switch

[Soundwave]

Fight-the-Streets said:

Soundwave said:

The other thing with this record stuff to me is it's sorta illegitimate if you need all these weird quirks to hit these hardware targets (like a massively longer product cycle and radio silence on any successor). If you can't hit the record in a normal 7-8 year product cycle it really isn't as impressive at all IMO. It would be like if they kept re-releasing Avatar 2 in theaters until it hit the no.1 all-time box office record ... I mean fine you did it, but if you needed like multiple releases to artificially heighten it, then to me it's a bit phony. 

Do it in a regular product cycle, Sony could probably hit 150+ million PS4s too if they really were hell bent on doing only that and just delayed PS5 and let it sell indefinitely but that's sort of bullshit in my books too. 

The DS was at 151 million on it's 7th birthday quarter (Q3 2004-Q3 end 2011) with the successor 3DS not only announced but released ... that's way better than the Switch or PS2, IMO that's the legitimate all-time sales champ, if you need like an extra 2-3 years to match/exceed that to me it's bullshit. If Nintendo really wanted arbitrary numbers, they easily could have force fed the DS (to the detriment of the 3DS) to 175 million really and no one would have a prayer of reaching that ever.

I see it differently. If you have a very successful product why don't you sell it for as many years as possible if there's no pressure from competitor? If all things were equal I would agree, obviously, if you sell a very big amount of systems in a shorter time, then you are the winner. However, circumstances in specific time periods are different (economy, competitors etc.). Therefore, we can never compare the last 7 years with say the years from 2005 to 2011. Pure numbers are only for geeks like us. Companies only care about profits. If they can sell just one super-duper luxury console that costs $1 billion to develop but they can sell it for $10 billion, they couldn't care less that it will be the worst selling console of all time. However, geeks like us are mainly focused on the pure numbers and records (and that's good). If it takes 6 or 10 years to break a record doesn't matter. Record is record!

If that's the metric though, DS wipes the floor with anyone, Nintendo could have easily sold that for an extra 2-3 years ... now it would've hurt the 3DS to do so

and that makes it a dumb move probably, but they could have hit 175+ million with the DS, the PS2 or Switch frankly would never be able to touch that. 

I don't think Nintendo really cares that much about end cycle LTD, it's a nice to have but not a must have. The fact that the DS was so close to the PS2 and Nintendo still nixed production and support for it tells you they really don't care about this stuff. I mean if it was even a passing fancy of a priority, there was no reason to not at least stuff the retail channel with a couple more million DS' and take the record then. 

Making a sports analogy if you told me one basketball player 1 scored 15,000 career points in 10 seasons played, while player 2 scored 17,5000 points in 15 seasons played ... IMO player 1 is the better scorer even if player 2 has more overall points scored in their career. 

The PS2 hit 150 million after 10 years + 11 months so almost 11 years basically ... the DS hit 150 million in just a bit over 7 years. IMO PS2 is a phony king in that regard. 

Last edited by Soundwave - on 05 May 2023