Will the Switch's successor outsell the original Switch?

[Shadow1980]

Norion said:

Yeah looking back it is wild that people were genuinely arguing that Animal Crossing was as big or an even bigger factor in Switch sales exploding that year than a massive global phenomenon that forced people indoors and pushed them towards forms of entertainment like video games.

Indeed. No individual game has ever pushed that much hardware. Not even close. The biggest boosts were like an order of magnitude less, lasting maybe 2-3 months at best before sales return to baseline levels and pushing several hundred thousand surplus hardware units in that time.

IcaroRibeiro said:

 I know you were waiting many years for this mate. Enjoy the moment, cheers

I'm just glad the board seems to have mellowed out on this issue. It got nasty there for a while back in 2020-21.

zorg1000 said:

Since the pandemic boost has been mentioned quite a bit, what do you guys think Switch sales would currently be without it?

Hard to say for sure, but I'll venture a guess, one that will assume that Switch 2 still releases in 2024 (let's say March).

By the end of 2019, the Switch was a bit behind where the PS4 was in the U.S. at the end of 2016 (its third year), though that's including the PS4's launch holiday. If you exclude that, the Switch was doing slightly better. The Switch did better in 2019 than the PS4 did in 2016. Most predictions at the start of 2020 seemed the think the Switch would be roughly flat over 2019 in the U.S., maybe a bit down, maybe a bit up (the average in Welfare's prediction thread for that year was 6383k), so the Switch would have still outpaced the PS4 in 2020 regardless. That means it was likely to start passing the PS4 in LTD terms even with the latter's launch holiday included. From 2020 onward, the Switch would likely have still done better than the PS4 did in each year past 2016. The Switch still most likely would have beaten the PS4 in the U.S., by a comfortable margin. It probably would have sold somewhere around 40M in the U.S., compared to a likely end total of around 36-37M for the PS4 (which had a better than expected 2020 up until stock was depleted in October of that year, but no legs at all due to continued lack of stock after 2020).

In Japan it was doing well out of the gate, selling much better than the PS4, but it was trailing the 3DS, which was previously the #3 system ever in Japan. However, the 3DS was fairly front-loaded, and even as early as the 2019 holiday season the Switch was starting to narrow its deficit against the 3DS. The 3DS had a big drop-off in its fourth year (a nearly 37.7% decline from the previous year), while early indications were the Switch was going to hold steady in 2020 or at worst maybe be down a bit. So, even without the pandemic the Switch stood a good chance of beating the 3DS to take the all-time #3 spot. It likely would have sold no less than 25M. I'm thinking somewhere around 27-28M. 30M was probably a long shot, but not impossible.

In Europe, the Switch was trailing the PS4 by a massive margin, and it still has an insurmountable deficit in the region. By VGC's count, by the end of 2016 the PS4 had sold 22.1M units while by the end of 2019 the Switch had sold only about 12.8M, and by all accounts that deficit was going to keep growing. The Switch was consistently doing slightly better in Europe than in Japan, something that has held true to the present in our timeline, so it's likely in the no-COVID timeline this would have remained the case as well. The Switch may have sold around 30M units in Europe, give or take.

So, between the U.S., Japan, and Europe, we're looking at 97-98M. Allot roughly 15% market share for the rest of the world, and that gives us a global estimate of somewhere around 115M, just short of the PS4. Worst case? Maybe around 100M. Best case? Maybe around 130M.