Hopefully Nintendo will learn from the mistakes of 2018 and in future years focus more on a steady cadence of new core games throughout the year as they did in 2017 to great effect. They got lazy and arrogant this year and thought they could cruise to 20 million by relying mostly on old ports and B/C tier games while going 13 long months without a proper system seller. They'd better not make that mistake again.

Who knows, maybe it let them know they can have solid sales with just a handful of small-medium sized hits in the first 45 weeks.

Games that had debuts over 100k. Kirby: Star Allies, Mario Tennis Aces, Octopath Traveler, Super Mario Party

Games that had debuts over 50k. Mario Rabbids, Labo Variety, DKC: Tropical Freeze, Minecraft, Taiko no Tatsujin

Games that had debuts over 25k. Dragon Quest Builders, Snack World, Labo Robot, Captain Toad, Pro Baseball Famista

If that lineup can make a $300 console maintain a steady 40-50k weekly baseline than why bother with mega sellers throughout the year?

That's like saying "why sell great when you can sell merely good?"

More sales are always better. Nintendo clearly want the Switch to be a 100 million plus seller lifetime, not another 3DS.

I agree completely and wasn't saying that's something they should do, but this is Nintendo we are talking about and they don't always do what they should.

Very true. I guess I was just daring to be optimistic and hoping they look at this year's rather soft Q1/2 and provide a more consistent lineup in 2019, 2020, etc.

I kinda shake my head about describing a company as lazy. Games take time to make, especially now, regardless of how much man power or money you have. You don't know what the developers are working on in the front-lines. We already got controversy in regards to Rockstar employees working crunch to complete RDR2. We already know Sakurai's notorious work ethic. They'll announce more original projects when they're ready to do so.

The results reflect a company that is not doing enough. If there's a manpower issue, they should hire more devs, expand their teams, contract out to more third parties, buy more second party studios.

Be careful what you wish for, if Sony censor the nudity scenes in SMT/Persona and demand Atlus to do the same to all versions then you will have Persona/SMT games with censorship everywhere on every platform. Look like Catherine will get some censorship as well.

They also devoted too much effort into the failure that is Labo.  And I say failure because it incredibly failed at what Nintendo wanted it to do.  They were hoping for a hit that would allow them to ride out the first half of the year.  Unfortunately, they had no back up plan in case it failed.  Now, it seems they will be 2M-3M short of their 20 goal.  Still good numbers, but it doesn't create a good image when you have to downgrade your estimate (which I think they will do in their next reports) while another company is constantly having to up theirs.

Bigger than I expected Switch HW sales even if the Let's Go sales aren't quite matching that level.