All three of these eras came with their own challenges and every time Nintendo succeeded despite the odds being stacked against them. Since the first and last of these three eras are spread so far apart in time, most metrics for comparison don't quite work. The major caveat is that people had nowhere near as much disposable income in the 1980s as they do today, so game sales and profits of the NES era aren't on an equal playing field with the Switch era. There's also the fact that game development was much harder, both in programming and in design, because there wasn't much video game history to look back on and take cues from. In terms of software sales, Switch still has to catch up to the Wii and DS era, so that's that.
But after typing one paragraph, it comes to my mind that there's one major problem with this whole comparison. It's that it's still up in the air whether or not the Switch era will be contained to only Switch or extend to its successor, whereas on the previous two occasions Nintendo faced much tougher conditions. And if it does extend - and the chances for that to happen are actually quite good - then the Switch era will be the easy call for Nintendo's most successful era yet.
Legend11 correctly predicted that GTA IV will outsell Super Smash Bros. Brawl. I was wrong.
