I think that's what will make 2018 interesting for Nintendo. Besides the first HD console Fire Emblem game (and possibly Xenoblade 2), it's out in the open of what Nintendo could do for the future. New IPs? Old franchises? Who knows. Maybe we'll see Sakurai's new work or even Retro Studio's. Maybe Pokémon will release in 2018.

See, there's a problem with reductive arguments like that. 3DS didn't sell poorly because it was too expensive, it sold poorly because it had a really bad library for its first 8 month. If the 3DS's first 9 months looked like the Switch's, it would have sold fine at $250. It's also not a handheld, it's a tabletop console, so it has completely different pricing expectations.

What if offers is home console games with flexibility to play off the TV, and a steady cadence of blockbuster 1st party exclusive games throughout the year, something both the 3DS and Wii U lacked. $300 is fine for that. You're undervaluing the tech and value proposition on display. The mass market won't.

200 million? The Wii and DS might of managed 250 million together but how much of that was people buying one of each, not to mention how the market has Changed . Yes it's absured to think that sort of number is possible.

When 3DS's price was cut from $250 to $170, its sales spiked by 260%. Clearly the price tag was a deal breaker for a lot of people.

And I'm not seeing this "steady cadence of first party blockbuster exlcusives", so far it has what, Zelda, Mario, Splatoon 2, all major blockbusters to be sure, but that's three for the whole year.

Lol, Switch would bé lucky to only reach 1/3 of Wii sales

You can't compare 3 year old tech prices to brand new tech. No one is looking at a $300 new device and thinking "man, this sure is overpriced compared to this 3 year old system." The Switch is new. It costs more. PS3 and 360 was "$200 with a bundle" when PS4 and XBO launched at $400 and $500. Didn't matter then. Won't matter ever. People understand what new tech entails.

You don't need to have a clue what 2018 will be like. You'll find that out at E3, like is always the case. You're saying "$300 with no bundle" as if consoles never sold well without launch bundles and with games with much less prestige than Zelda. As if having 6 major exclusive block busters releasing in the span of 8 months is somehow a weak showing. As if that isn't a good indication of how strong the exclusive line up will be next year.

Not will, and not "this thing." I'm saying it has the potential to, and I'm talking the entire platform over the span of like 7-8 years. That's including other iterations like a Switch Mini, Switch XL, etc.

But time will tell.

And yet, Nintendo did a massive price cut on it.  Now, do you really think that Nintendo would have done that if they didnt think it was strictly necessary?

And about your last sentence, well, the Switch is kind of a new proposition in the market, so WE DONT REALLY KNOW how the market is gonna react to it.  I mean, I am not saying that you cannot be optimist, but I think that keeping spectations in the low might be a healthier aproach.

Well yeah, they had to come up with a way to prevent 3DS sales from completely cratering and build momentum going into the holidays.

In terms of big sellers, 3DS had Nintendogs at launch in March, followed by Ocarina of Time 3D in June and nothing major until Mario Land, Mario Kart & Monster Hunter (in Japan) in Nov/Dec. It had a few small-medium size games in between but those were they only two games in the first 8 months that were million sellers.

If 3DS had a steady flow of big games than its possible that a big price cut would not have been needed.

Zorg addressed the first part as well as I ever could. As for the second, I never understood pretending that you have low expectations for something. The writing is on the wall for a successful platform. Why would I pretend to expect worse only to pretend to be surprised when it succeeds?

Now we don't really know how successful it will be, but we already definitively know things about the system. We know it's being marketed better than the Wii U. We know that no one is confused about what it is. We know that impressions are that it's a sleek and modern piece of tech, unlike Wii U. We know that it's slated to have a better lineup of exclusives in its first 9 months than both the Wii U and 3DS combined. We know that it's launching with one of the most anticipated games of the past 4 years, and the absolute best killer app since Wii Sports and TP on the Wii with Breath of the Wild. We know that its reveal teaser has a Youtube viewership remeniscent of the PS4's when it was revealed. We know that pre-orders are great. We know it's doing amazing in searches. We know that its support from Japanese publishers is exceptional. We know now that the Super Bowl Ad was well recieved.

We know enough about the Switch, even before making more obvious assumptions, to make an educated guess about how it's going to do well. People complained all throughout the Wii U that "if only Wii U did X, Y, and Z it would have been a hit." Switch is doing X, Y, Z and A, B, C, but I'm supposed to pretend its success, to some degree, isn't immenent because "it's healthier?" I'll take my chances.