The Road to 160m+ for Nintendo Switch (EDIT: See mod note in first post for new rule).

[Fight-the-Streets]

Norion said:

Fight-the-Streets said:

From a purely logical perspective: When people are forced to stay at home, sex becomes a popular pastime, and contraception is not always used consistently. This pattern can also be observed in years with prolonged power outages, storms, floods, or heavy snowfall, when people are compelled to stay indoors for extended periods. Such years tend to produce slightly higher numbers of births. The COVID-19 pandemic lasted unusually long, so one would expect its effects to show up statistically as well.

It is a complex topic. My fellow ChatGPT focuses more on the general long-term trend, which indeed still points toward declining birth rates in industrialized countries. Nevertheless, during the lockdown years, more children were conceived than would likely have been the case without them.

Data shows that the impact was tiny at most, with certain places having a relatively big decline in 2020 before slightly recovering afterwards before declining again like the US while other places like Japan it consistently declined every year from 2020-2022 so overall impact on Switch sales will be basically non-existent.

Well, I’m not fighting on the “Corona babies” hill. In the end, it’s a small factor anyway. But in such a tight race, it’s precisely the small factors that can decide between victory and defeat.

Even though the competition between the Nintendo Switch and the PS2 is more of a marathon, I like to compare it to a ski race. There, a hundredth of a second can determine whether you win or lose.

On a launch-aligned basis, the Switch has been ahead at every intermediate split so far. The problem is that conditions in the final sector of the race have deteriorated so much that it’s no longer possible to match — let alone exceed — the PS2’s speed there. In this last sector, the Switch will therefore definitely be slower (that is, sell fewer units). The Switch enters this final sector with a lead, but can still only win if it manages to keep the damage in the final stretch reasonably under control.