So are you going to address what Rol said about the NPDs? 

*goes back to lurking*

Power-hungry gamers fear NS because they fear next gen both Sony and MS will follow its example, at least partially, including a hybrid model in the range of their home console platform, so the power of such model will be the minimum games will need to not exceed in their requirements, and games without additional budget for optimisations will just upscale or offer what standard lòibraries and drivers can do without rewriting code on more powerful models. Moreover, having arrived mid-gen, NS example will force Sony and MS to pospone their next gen launch if they want to follow its example, for many reasons, the most important is raw development times, rushing a project is always bad, and doing it after introducing a radically different paradigm is even worse, the second most important reason is that even the hybrid models will need to outperform current gen base models, at least when docked, and they'll have to do it at a cost that allow the console to be priced at no more than $400 at launch.

I love these take backs to install base.

The way it is tossed in this thread one would be led to believe that if Zelda was release to PS4+X1 instead of selling 7M it would sell over 70M.

Yeah, it's a bit confusing but the DS followed the blue ocean strategy. The Wii was not a blue ocean strategy product, it was a disruptive product: There was overshooting in the home console market (exploding dev costs, PS3 was very expensive, most people back in 2006 did not have HD TV's --> too many features for most people) so Nintendo made a "crappy" disruptive product that sucked by old standards (graphics, etc.) but established new standards (motion controls, multiplayer games). 

The DS was a blue ocean product by the book: Games like Nintendogs, Brain Training and others were aimed at new audiences ("non-gamers") and the touch screen was used to make new gaming experiences possible. So their handheld line was explicitly made with blue ocean strategy in mind while their home consoles never were. A disruptive product is not the same as following the blue ocean strategy.

Nobody is saying that, just that looking at chart performance of games on a 2.6m vs ~37m and making conclusions about legs is quite illogical.

Wait, why is selling 70% of lifetime sales in 18 months considered bad legs?

Why did you pick 70% or 18 months as the cutoff?

What about 50% of sales in the first 12 months?

Or what about 30% of sales in first 6 months?

It seems like you picked two absolutely arbitrary variables and acted like thats standard.

That is the modus operandi at VGC. Always resort to userbase and install base to reflect an analysis of sales of one game against other.

Sure sometimes people will use install base as an excuse when its not really a factor but in this case it 100% needs to be considered.

Hes comparing NPD legs of Wii to SW but not factoring in that Wii was released at the same time as PS3 and only 1 year after 360 while SW was released ~3.5 years after PS4/XBO.

This is a huge factor resulting in SW having 1/14 the install base of PS4+XBO while Wii was closer to 1/2 of PS3+360 after 8 months on the market.

That is undeniably a huge difference that needs to be factored in when comparing the two.

To me the userbase of the others aren't relevant. But legs and ranking aren't necessarily correlated.

See my previous reply... for the legs of the current games launching, saying PS4/X1 have much more userbase is irrelevant. But also there is little value to say the Switch games weren't on TOP 20, the month may have had a lot of solid releases. The legs of those games (which I agree will probably be very good).

On LoZ:BotW is one of the few situations were we surely would need to consider the lack of available userbase to sell through because the attach rate is immense. But legwise it's possible it won't have much unless it breaks by a lot all of Zelda previous installments for total sale, because it is already quite high.

Anyway, from what we know from at least Wii and WiiU, Nintendo flagships have legs (although the guy didn't say the games of Switch won't have legs, just that it will be smaller than Wii) but we really can't be sure how much better or worse its leg will be compared to the flagships in Wii.