Will the Switch's successor outsell the original Switch?

[Shadow1980]

zorg1000 said:

So I’m not arguing that Covid didn’t have an impact, I absolutely think it did, but I think you are severely overestimating the impact. It’s looking like Switch will sell ~150 million and by your estimates 20-50 million of that is from Covid, or ~35 million as your most likely prediction.

I guess my problem with this is, I understand that 2020/2021 sales would be elevated from the pandemic but why would 2022/2023 sales remain elevated? Shouldn’t there have been a very substantial drop after the pandemic instead of the steady decline we have seen?

2022/2023 did not have lockdowns, businesses and schools were not closed, stimulus checks were not going out, the expanded child tax credit had ended, enhanced unemployment benefits had ended, mortgage forbearance programs had ended, etc. for the most part, life was back to normal.

yearly sales (vgchartz numbers)

2019-~19 million

2020-~28 million

2021-~24 million

2022-~19 million

2023-15+ million (estimate)

If 2020/2021 were elevated from the pandemic than 2022 should have had a substantial drop and been a good deal below 2019 sales (the year you say should have been the peak or close to peak) instead of on par with it.

The biggest problem you are making is assuming that the consensus among this sites 2020 predictions were correct, we were wrong (myself included). I think we can look back and see that Switch was poised to have a solid boost in 2020 regardless of Covid and not just because of Animal Crossing.

Look at the lineup from September 2019-March 2020, it had Switch Lite, first new Pokemon generation, Animal Crossing, Ring Fit, Luigi’s Mansion, 2D Zelda, Dragon Quest. January/February were already up over 22% YoY before Covid/Animal Crossing boost. This reminds me of the late 2005-mid 2006 period where DS had Nintendogs, Brain Age, New Super Mario Bros, Mario Kart, Animal Crossing & DS Lite in like a 9 month period which caused DS to go from a strong selling to massive selling device.

Basically in order for 2022 to be on par with 2019 than 2020/2021 would have to had sizable boosts even without the Covid boost, something like

2019-19 million

2020-24 million

2021-21 million

2022-19 million

I would say your best case scenario of 130 million should be the worat case scenario without covid.

My initial 115M estimate did assume that 2022 onward would be lower than IRL in a COVID-free world due to a non-trivial portion of the last couple of years being due to inertia from the initial boom. However, I'm more than willing to concede that COVID was only a factor in 2020-21, and that 2022 onward would have been the same regardless. It is worth noting that the the Switch's sales in 2022 were down below 2019 levels in the U.S. & Europe, and only slightly ahead of 2019 levels in Japan (because of the residual boost from the OLED keeping sales in the first two thirds of 2022 stronger than in 2019, though the last third of 2019 was stronger than that of 2022 thanks to the Lite), so I could see a potential scenario where the Switch had a relatively flat mid-life period, with 2019-21 being a relatively stable period followed by a decline beginning in 2022.

So, let's assume an alternate COVID-free timeline with a three year stretch where 2020A* was roughly flat or only very slightly down from 2019A, 2021A was somewhere between 2020A and 2022A, and 2022A onward had the same sales as IRL. Given the figures we have for 2017-19 and 2022-present, this would imply that somewhere between 10-15M surplus units came from COVID. Of course, there's other possible scenarios, like 2020 being down a bit from 2019, only for 2021 to jump back up to 2019 levels because of the OLED bump.

Ultimately, though, we have no way of knowing for sure. We can't simply go to another universe where the only difference was that COVID never existed and see how the console market of the early 2020s turned out. What we do know is that most people were expecting the Switch to be about flat in 2020, which initially was looking like a reasonable expectation given what sales were in January & February that year, and that COVID had a huge impact. It's the only plausible explanation for the massive gains we saw in 2020-21.

But as I said, I can concede that the Switch's sales in 2022 onward might have been the same regardless of whether COVID existed, in which case 130-140M would be a more plausible range estimate. That means the share of Switch units attributable to the COVID bump still had to be somewhere in the 10-20M range, probably the mid to lower end of that range. So even then, it wasn't some minuscule bump, especially if we agree that it was all concentrated into just 2020-21. 10-15M extra in two years isn't nothing. Not as much as 30M, but still a lot.

*To use Back to the Future nomenclature for alternate timelines.