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CheddarPlease said:
eldanielfire said:

I can see it selling less than 6 million. The DS only sold 5 million when the year 3DS came out. And that was with a bad 3DS launch and DS being cheap and getting more Pokemon games. There comes a point when the market is saturated. Nintendo are about to drop their Switch Sales forecast for the 2nd time this past year.

The only way the Switch sells some of these optimistic projections people are making is with a big price cut and there's no guarantee Nintendo will do that in the current tech climate.

It was precisely b/c of that bad 3DS launch that the DS only sold 5 million that year. The 3DS sold so badly at launch that Nintendo had to cut its price to $170, only $40 more expensive than the $130 DSi. It would be like if the Switch 2 received a price cut to $350 only 2 months after it launched. As soon as Nintendo cut the price for the 3DS, no reason existed for people to get a DS, especially since the 3DS had full backward compatibility.

And let's assume the Switch does only sell as well as the DS post-replacement from this quarter onwards. Switch sales this holiday are looking to be about on par with last year, about 6 mil. That gives us a total of 152m Switches shipped through Dec 2024. From the start of 2011, when it was replaced, the DS sold 9.42m more units until it was discontinued. Assuming the Switch sells the exact same amount (which for the reasons I just mentioned would be a very conservative estimate), it would still make it past 161m lifetime. In summary, 160m is not an optimistic projection at all

Exactly. I don't see the Switch 2 having to drop a full $80 five months in due to a lack of games and a gimmick that won't sell it.

And unlike the 3DS to Switch transition, buying into a Switch now grants consumers the ability to transfer their accounts and games over to a Switch 2 in the future unlike the 3DS, which essentially became a dead-end purchase at that point.  And the 3DS still managed to sell around 9m after the Switch released.