The Road to 160m+ for Nintendo Switch

[CheddarPlease]

Norion said:

RolStoppable said:

If you base it on the DS, then you have to expect the same timeline the 3DS went through during its launch year. The 3DS tremendously underperformed which forced Nintendo to issue a major price cut that was so severe that it sandwiched the 3DS at $170 between the DSi at $150 and the DSi XL at $180. With this kind of setup it's no wonder that the backwards compatible 3DS cut into DS sales in a significant way.

We don't know what Switch's successor price will be nor its year 1 lineup, plus we lack reasons to assume that it could be as bad as the 3DS following the DS. In the event of lack of knowledge, I refrain from assuming the worst and the best case scenarios as the likeliest ones. So if we default to the middle, yes, 11m this fiscal year are good enough to push Switch past 160m.

The DS Lite also got a price cut in 2011 though so there was still some gap between it and the 3DS after that and the Switch falling a little bit short of the DS's post successor wouldn't be the worst case scenario since the DS shipped 17.5m in its final fiscal year before the 3DS came out so the Switch wouldn't need to fall off as hard to fall a bit short. The worst case scenario would be it falling off harder followed by it falling off equally as hard. The Switch Lite being a notably cheaper option will help avoid those scenarios though.

To be clear at this point it definitely has a good shot of reaching 160m, I just think there's still a reasonable chance it falls a bit short depending on what Nintendo does over the next couple years.

My opinion is that the only way it misses 160m is if it fails to hit 11m this year, which isn't completely out of the question, but the point I think we were trying to make is that 11m as a baseline basically puts anything less than 160m out of the probable realm of possibility