The Road to 160m+ for Nintendo Switch

[Farsala]

Soundwave said:

DS hit 150 million sold at roughly 7 years on market, PS2 took almost 11 years to get to the same 150 mark (almost 4 extra years on market). Both got a bit beyond 150 mill but neither got to 160 mill.

C'mon.

This isn't even remotely close. DS was absolutely trouncing the PS2 before Nintendo called off the dogs. The only reason the PS2 is above the DS is because it got to sell at a discount price for several extra years the DS was not allowed to due to the PS3 being such a dud out of the gates. Plain and simple, if DS was given the same opportunity by Nintendo it would have killed the PS2. 

If you want to use a sports analogy it's like one basketball player hitting 15,400 points in 10 seasons and another player hitting 15,800 points in 14 seasons ... like the first player is very obviously the better scorer (it's actually why the NBA uses points per game as their metric for scoring champion, not overall points). 

Something you are missing is that PS2 didn't take 11 years to hit 150m in most markets. The console had very late launches in a ton of territories. starting with Japan and then 9 months later in America and then Europe. Korea and Taiwan didn't launch until 2002. India and China didn't launch until 2003. Brazil didn't launch until 2009 (!) . Many other markets like the Middle East also had late launches.

This is where the origination of the myth "Ps consoles have good legs" comes from, and why a lot of people expected the Ps4 to sell much better than it did, simply due to the launch timings of these different consoles. Ps4 having a global launch made it easy to break shipment records, even in "launch aligned" comparisons.