RolStoppable said:
At least 1.8 billion. There have been a lot of indie success stories on Switch and there are thousands of digital-only games. DSiWare and WiiWare had very few quality games and neither service offered any kinds of discounts on games, so I estimate combined sales to be below 25 million units. This puts total DS and Wii software at ~1.9 billion. |
There is still a flaw to your analysis. A lot of people who did not buy switch games bought Wii and DS games. These people bought games like Wii Fit, Nintendogs and brain age, games which sold half or a third as much on Switch. I could try to crunch numbers but it should be easy to calculate a few 100s of millions of missed sales.
My point is that the Switch sold gamer-centric games much more powerfully than usual, so they increased their performance on that segment. But had they not, the tie ratio would have been much lower. This means that the potential for Switch indeed was much higher than what we got. This means that the HW sales should follow this higher tie ratio leading to a much higher HW sales value. So the Switch most likely undersold hardware and software. But it's tie ratio is abnormally high for sure, this means that gamers bought more games on fewer consoles. It strengthens my point, as a normal tie ratio would mean the HW sales should be proportionately higher. Hard point to understand but it's true. Higher tie ratio really only means more games sold to a given console, it doesn't mean more players.
For example, just brain age series goes like this:
Wii Fit:
