The thing about the OP is that what they are SAYING is totally correct, but what they are IMPLYING is totally wrong.  They are implying the Switch won't be a successful system, and we all know now this is false.  However, what they are saying is that first month sales don't really tell you much about the console's long term success, and they are totally right.

The funnier thing is the recent posts that say this thread is happening all over again.  Guys, the Switch 2 hasn't even launched yet.  There seem to be a group of people who can't tell the difference between forecasting and data.

You know something else that is meaningless...

The outcry from the internet! lol

Wtf is an antecessor?

Switch barely launched and @tbone51  already came out with his killer predictions ;)

While all my older posts got prior to Oct. 2022 got wiped out when the site got hacked back then, I'm pretty sure at one point years before the Switch was even the "NX" that I pointed out that launch sales are never a good indicator of lifetime sales. A system's launch numbers depend on demand and the ability to meet demand. Some consoles that did poorly in lifetime sales still had enough early demand from brand loyalists and enough supply for the system to have a solid launch. Some consoles that did very well lifetime had mediocre launch numbers.

Gen 6 is a good example of this. The Dreamcast had a lot of people interested in it ahead of launch, and some though it might be Sega's big comeback. The system actually put up fairly solid launch numbers in the U.S., selling a respectable 569k in Sept. 1999 (far better than the launch months of the N64 & PS1), and a further 902k in Q4 that year, which wasn't bad at all. But it fell off a cliff in 2000, selling fewer units that year than it did in just four months of 1999. It ultimately ended up selling only 4M units lifetime in the U.S. The initial strong interest did not translate to strong lifetime sales. It was a great system that had its fans, but the damage done by the Saturn ended up being impossible for Sega to recover from.

Later in 2000 the PS2 put up launch numbers that were rather unimpressive. Not bad, but certainly not one would expect from the successor to what had become the biggest console ever. It actually had a worse launch month than the Dreamcast, selling 391k units in October of that year. It sold just over 1.1M for that whole quarter; in fact, it barely outsold the Dreamcast that holiday season (even losing to it ever so slightly in November) and fell way short of the PS1. Meanwhile, the GameCube & Xbox had far better launches, selling 663k and 722k in November 2001, respectively, with launch holiday totals of over 1.2M and 1.4M. This means the Xbox actually had the biggest launch of any console in the U.S. to date at that point.

None of that mattered. The PS2 won that generation easily in every market. Even in the more competitive U.S. market, it still managed to have majority market share for the generation as a whole before the 360 was released. The PS2 had a mediocre launch because it was supply constrained. The demand was there, but In fact, it wasn't until March 2001 that it finally started getting enough supply to meet demand in the U.S. Speaking of supply, the following generation we had an even bigger stock problem, as the 360, PS3, and Wii were all supply constrained, yet we all saw how well all three did.

And it's not just the U.S. where we see this. Here's launch week numbers for Japan:

It's pretty obvious that this is overall not reflective of where these systems ended up relative to each other in lifetime sales.

A rarely-used synonym for "predecessor." "Ante-" being the opposite of "Post-."

That's not true at all about PS2's launch being rather unimpressive:

https://www.ign.com/articles/2000/11/07/sony-pulls-in-over-250-million-at-launch

As you said, PS2 was completely supply constrained.  It would have steamrolled the Dreamcast immediately had the units been there.  That massive launch day for the PS2 in the US was the single biggest consumer product launch in dollars by far at the time - far exceeding the Dreamcast, which itself had just tripled the last biggest.  

I agree that "sold out" at launch doesn't mean much without context, but it's quite different when we know the huge numbers with PS2/PS4/PS5 right out of the gate, just like we already know of the 6m-8m pre-orders for Switch 2 (if true).  Game systems with those kinds of launch sellouts are a pretty good indicator of success I'd say.  They could very well decline and not live up to their potential, but they're not just going to collapse.

Could be a lot worse, there were at least a handful of people still expecting it to do 3DS numbers as late as 2019 lol.

True, funny as it may look now it's far from the most egregious miss; I remember a lot of predictions in 2017 that it would sell on par or even worse than Wii U.

Hell, I myself expected it to sell poorly after the January 2017 show; during the Wii U era the vibes were just rancid and it felt like Nintendo just couldn't get anything right.

There's a famous thread on neogaf about predicting how much Switch would sell, and 90% of posts are like "lol it's DOA."

I don't fully remember what my expectations were for it pre-launch but by the end of April I was expecting a big success if Nintendo didn't screw up and thought it could outsell the Wii U in just its first year. Though I also thought it would start to truly fly off the shelves big time after 1-2 price cuts and a cheap revision at half the price of the launch model but amazingly it's gotten to 150m with basically no price cuts.