Alternate history: Switch a generation earlier

[RolStoppable]

padib said:

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.

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Your point is hard to understand because it's not making sense.

It starts with your assumption that people who started with Wii Fit, Nintendogs and Brain Age have to be playing only these types of game forever when it was already clear on the DS and Wii that series like Mario Kart and New Super Mario Bros. benefited from new influx of Nintendo gamers. Now on Switch we have Mario Kart sell 60m copies and Animal Crossing 40m. You'd like to have a wall of separation between Wii Fit etc. and "gamer-centric games" as you call them, but there's no wall.

In order to make this point easier to understand, just think of your own playing habits. Did you stick exclusively to the same genres for decades or did you try out new things eventually? But maybe you didn't and that's why you assume everyone else is like that too.