The Road to 160m+ for Nintendo Switch

[RolStoppable]

CourageTCD said:

RolStoppable said:

No, 162.0m is the threshold for absolute certainty, because that's above the high end of the estimated range for the PS2's lifetime sales.

I'd kinda like to comment on other things going on in this thread recently, but at the same time I can't be bothered to find out what all the fuzz was about in the first place.

162M? Geez, it seems like the potencial maximum number for the PS2 increases every time this topic is brought up. I thought the maximun possible number for the PS2 was 160.9M something like that

The calculated range is 158.6m to 161.8m and there's no maths that could push it any higher. That's why 162.0m will constitute absolute certainty that Switch is the best-selling system of all time while 161.9m could still have people argue about rounding.

The thing is that every year we've had people worrying about Switch hitting a certain threshold in lifetime sales. Even despite starting in a healthier position than the 3DS, it was still in doubt for a lot of people that Switch could sell more than 75 million units. Every year the bar had to be moved higher while the doubters tried their best to lay the bar as low as possible. In early 2020 we still had people questioning if 100m is possible. Then we went from 110m to 120m to 130m to 140m to 150m to now 160m.

It was always a question of longevity, but rarely did it happen that people actually focused on Switch itself, and instead they tried to draw parallels with other systems and repurpose those analyses back to Switch. What Switch has going for it is first party support that is A+ and third party support that is B+. It's only B+ because megahits like Monster Hunter are extremely rare to be made, but the number of potential million sellers and overall number of quality additions to the library are very high. A steady flow of interesting content is what makes a system sell for a long time and there's still no end in sight for Switch, because we are still getting a new first party game almost every month and a sequel to Pokémon Legends is announced for 2025. Third parties aren't going to stop supporting Switch anytime soon anyway, because their own transitional periods from current gen to next gen keep getting longer with each generation.

Switch is guaranteed to hit 150m before its successor launches. We also know that Switch's successor won't be cheap, so Switch will continue to sell alongside its successor for a couple of years. Perhaps with fewer first party titles that the 3DS got post-replacement, but for sure with more third party games. The 3DS entered its post-replacement phase on the back of a 7m fiscal year whereas Switch will have at least 11m in the same situation, so it's undeniable that Switch will go into its final phase of life with much better momentum. Adding 10m more after the fiscal year ending March 2025 isn't that big of a challenge under these circumstances, especially because it's possible that the successor won't even launch during the first half of calendar year 2025, which would allow Switch to hit 155m before getting replaced.

Half a year ago I said in a different thread that Switch's chances to outsell the PS2 are at 90%. Nothing extraordinary has happened since then, so the odds remain the same. I acknowledge that there's still a realistic possibility for pessimistic scenarios to come true, but at the same time the likelihood for them to happen is very low. The requirement for Switch to fall short of the PS2 is pretty much a repeat of the DS to 3DS transition where the successor system was messed up and got its price quickly cut to shift sales from the old system to the new system. But such a collosal blunder is improbable because of how Nintendo is handling the Switch platform up till now: It's carefully and patiently planned as opposed to the DS to 3DS transition where Nintendo had rushed the successor to the market.