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JWeinCom on 06 August 2023
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Wman1996 said:

I did already say hopefully no secret sauce, but I thought of a new analogy to explain it. Here is an exchange from Kung Fu Panda.
Mr. Ping: The secret ingredient is... nothing!
Po: Huh?
Mr. Ping: You heard me. Nothing! There is no secret ingredient.
Po: Wait, wait... it's just plain old noodle soup? You don't add some kind of special sauce or something?
Mr. Ping: Don't have to. To make something special you just have to believe it's special.
[Po looks at the scroll again, and sees his reflection in it]
Po: There is no secret ingredient...
Switch 2 needs no secret ingredient, at least not out of the box.
When you consider that Sega was now stiff competition, Nintendo didn't make that many screw-ups with the SNES/Super Famicom. If Genesis was niche like other Sega platforms, SNES probably would've equaled or surpassed NES/Famicom in sales. A bizarre gimmick with SNES probably wouldn't have made it sell anymore. Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance had no secret ingredient compared to Game Boy. They just had better specs and games people wanted to play.
Switch's hybrid nature is enough to make it unique in the field. Nintendo just needs better specs and games people want to play and you're looking at 100 million at least, possibly 115 million or more.

The GBA analogy is flawed.

The GBA might have sold more than the Gameboy over its lifespan. It started out quicker, but that's largely because Pokemon really revolutionized the handheld industry. The best sales year the Gameboy had were the last 3 years before the GBA, which were the ones after Pokemon came out. 

More importantly though, the Gameboy Advance was an absolutely massive leap over what the Gameboy or Gameboy Color were capable of.

The upgrade in visual was staggering. There are tons of games that you can do on GBA that could not be done in a remotely comparable quality on GBC.

For the Switch 2, that's unlikely. We are going to get games that are going to look pretty similar to those on the Switch, just with better lighting or resolution. Which is nice, but nowhere near the leap we saw from GBC to GBA. 

Kind of seems like you missed the point they were making in Kung Fu Panda. It was about the importance of perception. The customers had to be convinced that the product was somehow special or exciting. Likewise, Nintendo has to convince people their new product is exciting or special. They can't just say there is some undefined secret feature, and I don't think they can convince people based on the type of visual upgrade that would be possible. So, I think that their business will likely contract with a straight iterational upgrade. If Nintendo wants to settle for 100m or so, then that's their call, but that's a pretty big drop. Actually selling more units would probably be preferable.