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Norion on 08 August 2023
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JWeinCom said:
Norion said:

The vast, vast majority of that over 1.5 billion aren't in NA, Europe or Japan though. It's not the max a console can ever do of course but the portion of console sales those territories take up hasn't changed much in a long time so it's unlikely it's suddenly gonna shift significantly in a short period. For attitudes changing that could potentially help but attitudes won't have changed that much since the launch of the Switch. It's more Nintendo consoles following the Switch's successor that might notably benefit from a shift in these things so the Switch 2's growth potential is primarily gonna be from Europe and you're only looking at another 10-15m at most that could be gained from there.

US Population has grown by 50 million. EU has 20 million more. Canada has 8 million more. Japan is about a million less. Mexico is about 25 million more. Australia has about 6 million more. And PS2 sold more in the "rest of the world" than it did in Japan. And, the "rest of the world" numbers are likely misleading, because in certain countries (China or Brazil for instance) many consoles are imported due to absurd prices in the home countries. I know I personally sold a lot of systems that were headed oversees when I worked at Best Buy. There's definitely a significant number of new customers compared to PS2. 

Switch's growth doesn't depend solely or even mostly on overall attitude changes or population changes. Those just show why the PS2 sales shouldn't be treated as a cap. If Switch 2 sales were to grow, the likely causes would be either Nintendo making really great new software, something more appealing about the hardware itself, or likely some combination of the two.

There are more new customers of course yeah but I don't think the cap has increased by enough to make a risky push for growth worth it. I'd bet that right now it's not possible for a console to reach 200m unless it has an abnormally long life cycle like the GB. A Switch successor with a normal lifespan reaching even the 180's would be so unlikely that it'd be an astounding achievement if it happened. Considering how well Sony is doing the best path is to keep the Switch brand going until there's a clear notable decline in interest in it which for sure won't be happening this decade and if Nintendo doesn't mess up might not happen for a really long time.