This will be quite the jump considering current fiscal year. But hey they can make it happen.

To not go on lenght with your reach argument (as before this gen most consoles have launched in different years) PS2+Xbox close to PS3+X360 close to PS4+X1, which show that if one of they dropped from the market the other would greatly gain.

Do you think PS4 would have sold 35M this year if Switch didn't launch? Or Perhaps Xbox would sell 25M? Or what split would PS4 and X1 receive from Switch not launching?

And sorry to open your eyes, but forum aren't a representation of reality.

I mean if you are saying the markets don't completely overlap I agree. I wouldn't expect to see a complete displacement of sales. 3DS actually has seen the biggest hit from Nintendo Switch, but it was necessary to be replaced on the market as it is at the end of its life cycle. PS4 probably saw about a 10% hit in hardware sales from Switch, 10% to software, and 10% to accessories. Probably slightly higher for Microsoft. Even though their sales are flat YOY they would have higher numbers. Maybe 15-20% higher. I expect that percentage to increase this year, but it depends on what kind of price drops there are. Switch didn't even have a great 2018 from a Software release standpoint minus the Holiday season. And even that was light they just had some really big sellers.

I don't really think PS4 would have hit 22M (2017) and 20M (2018) without Switch in the market. But ok for the sake of argument I'll agree.

If your competitor can take 10% of your market when they perform great then it is more of a substitute/indirect competitor than a direct competitor. Which is one of the points when discussing monopolies, even if it seems like you are a monopoly (as 3DS almost became due to PSVita being very bad on the market, and GameBoy had) if you don't have a good product people will go to substitutes, like smartphones/consoles on the case of 3DS or consoles for Gameboy. Meaning that other products may take away some of your sale, but that doesn't mean they are directly competing.

If Wii didn't exist some of the 100M would go to PS360, but not most, because Wii was in a blue ocean. Now if Nintendo by not making Wii decided to make exclusives to either of the PS360 them that would move much more buyers due to a good amount that would only buy HW that play Nintendo games.

@bolded: That's a fallacy, because while it works on a global scale and in Europe, in the US there's quite some difference (PS360 sold almost exactly as much as PS2+XB+GC combined in the US - and GC sold over 12M there, too much to leave out) and in Japan you'll flat out have to include the Nintendo console for this to even just work (otherwise PS2=PS3+PS4+360+XBO; and that's without factoring even the OG Xbox); future will also tell us how far the PS4+X1 works regionally. In other words, it's a false positive. Even worse, If PS4+XBO only reach around last gen's numbers, that in practice would mean a net decrease due to the all the people who upgraded mid-gen.

@underlined: Did you not read or just didn't understand (or didn't want to understand) what I wrote? PS4 and XBO would probably have sold one or 2 million more from customers who were interested before but choose to buy a Switch instead since then, not that the entirety of Switch buyers would have bought a PS4 or XBO instead. Most of the other Switch buyers either have another console already, play non-Nintendo games on PC or got bought for kids from their parents.

@italic: So PS4 outselling Xbox as told on the forum is a hoax? I never said that everybody who bought a Switch left their other console int he dust afterwards, and neither did I imply that everybody who got a Switch buys their third party games there, just that some people do - and sorry to open your eyes, but that's the definition of direct competition. What you just don't seem to grasp is that the Switch isn't a big competition when it comes to third party games (at least not yet, but I also doubt it ever seriously will, though technically it's not impossible) and thus people who want to buy those most of the time will buy Xbox, Playstation or a PC instead, not because the Switch isn't competition, but because it's (and really Nintendo) not known for those kind of games.

Sure it will change when looking per region or country, as will change the demography of these countries in 5 or 10 years.

Do you have any source for 15M of Switch buyers this year already having other console? And if they have that pretty much show they aren't competing directly if costumer think they need both.

If Nintendo console doesn't offer 3rd party and thus won't sell for customers who want a console that have 3rd party games, that again put it not in direct competition.

But you need to decide yourself. Because in one point you put that most of Switch buyers have another console or PC, and in the other you say that people that want 3rd party wont buy Switch.

People seem to have very few ideas about realistic costs in hardware and software development.

Switch has pretty expensive components like a touch screen, a multitude of advanced sensors and a lot of communication stuff (remember not only the device itself has bluetooth, but each of the joycons). All that is integrated highly to reach a small form factor. This last point is important, as this is an engineering problem, for instance for heat removal.

PS4 and Xbox on the other hand use standard components, put them together in a standard way. They use a big form-factor which simplifies greatly heat dispersion. The biggest technological problems here are mostly the controllers. Which are bigger than Joycons too and make it also easier to integrate a lot of sensors.

So R&D for PS4 and Xbox hardware is nearly at lazy level and manufacturing problems are pretty low, components are straightforward standard. For Switch R&D probably was pretty expensive, setting up manufacturing is because of the small form factor also a lot more complicated and finnicky. And yes, therein you see one reason why smartphones are so expensive.

For games similar wrong ideas seem to persist. Basically many people think, the more polygons are visible at the same time, the more expensive the game is. But in reality it isn't that straightforward. True is, if you design the same objects once in high resolution and once in low, the high resolution s more expensive. But for multiplats you actually design the objects only once and let tools recalculate the mesh for different target resolution and performance goals.

More important for the cost of game development is the actual amount of content. If one game has ten times as many objects because it has a bigger game world, then it doesn't matter if each object is a bit simpler. Testing, voice acting, world, character design - these are areas usually taking a lot of manpower. Now you can see the platform is miniscule in the actual impact, the vision for the game impacts mostly the costs. And another point: after developing a game the cost of copying is very small. Physical copies like carts or discs and their packaging and distribution are a bit more expensive, but this is basically the same for each game. So the main factor are sales (assuming constant price). Which means games with expected big sales usually get a bigger budget but sell at the same price.

When you put touchscreen as something expensive you are doing yourself a disfavor. Nintendo is know for not taking losses on the consoles while MS and Sony do. So when PS4 and X1 released they where taking loses about 50 USD. So their consoles costed 450 on the HW itself with MS Kinect adding about another 100 USD. While Switch is probably having some 50 USD profit on the HW... so in the end is 250 vs 450 HW.

On the game you are being misleading at least.

Nintendo investment and cost on their flagship games are much much much smaller than Sony or MS per game. Unless you really think GoW costed almost the same as Odissey to develop.

I'm just showing you why not everybody who bought a Switch would have bought a PS4 or XBO instead and why, and that the Switch probably only cost about 1-2M sales to the PS4 and XBO until now, simply because most people still buy those consoles for third party titles. But not everybody does, and some prefer being able to play these on the go, thus buying them on the Switch and thus providing direct competition. Is that really so hard to understand or do you twitch around my words on purpose?

We actually have no real idea about losses/winnings on console manufacturing. It seems that at one point the production of PS3 was more expensive than it's asking price - but that changed. The 3DS was apparently loss-lead after the price-cut, but Nintendo worked on getting the device back into the profit-zone. Other than that I don't knwo about examples that we actually know if it was profitable.

The thing that Playstation (and by extension later Xbox) is loss-leading is an actual legend, that was mostly perpetuated by Nintendo fans (PS must dump their prices to sell consoles while Nintendo can ask for quality prices because their console have actual value).

I know people tend to make completely speculative calculations, which list the components, add their price and assume this is the cost. These calculations are flawed to the core. Let me explain:

1. First of all, the most expensive components in these calculations - CPUs and GPUs - have prices which are itself a complete fiction. The actual cost for producing a CPU or GPU are made up by the following: R&D (that is pretty high for modern stuff), die size, yield, semiconductor manufacturing process size and as usual packaging and distribution. R&D is a high one-time cost. If you sell more units with the same R&D, the R&D cost is split over more units and so the cost is lower per unit. For the other three let me explain a bit. Semiconductors are produced these days, by imprints faults on a big silicium wafer. The wafers have standardized sizes, they are cut up into the actual chips afterwards. So, if you CPU or GPU has a smaller die, one wafer produces more chips. As imprinting one wafer cost the same regardless in how many units you cut it up, smaller chips are cheaper to produce. The yield is the rate of defective units. The silicium wafer is very pure, but it can have faults before imprinting. These lead to defective chips. They are sorted out in testing. The less you have to sort out, the lower the cost. The manufacturing process size is more complicated. Obviously with 7nm you get more chips from a wafer as with 15nm, as the die is smaller. But a 7nm manufacturing is more complicated and is more suspectible to defective units. As knowledge with a process progressive, these downsides are reduced though.

What does it mean in conclusion? Well, if a two chips from the same series use the same manufacturing process and the same die size, they cost exactly the same to produce. But in reality they are clocked differently or different features are enabled or disabled, to sell them at greatly differing prices. This is a marketing tool, to reach different groups of consumers. But if the prices are basically made up, what does it mean if Sony, MS and Nintendo ask? That they can get completely different prices depending on the deals they strike. This can involve more than just simply money for chip, for instance was Sony pretty involved in the design and production of the Cell processor, so they probably had a different deal.

2. If you produce a console, you need millions of parts - that are exactly the same. These days usually people have different needs and so each one purchases a different CPU for example. But if you get the same PS4 model, you have exactly the same CPU. Remember I said that R&D makes a lot of the actual cost of CPUs and GPUs. If a manufacturer strikes a deal for a console, he can split the R&D cost between a lot of actually produced units. I can easily see that Sony, MS and Nintendo pay less than half for CPU and GPU, than we would do for something similar. For other parts the reduction may not as big, as they don't have as much R&D cost, but the mass production drops the prices for these parts too.

3. These calculations usually ignore the manufacturing of the console. All the parts don't assemble themself. The manufacturing is a lot more difficult, if the parts are more integrated. Meaning that the Switch very likely leads to much higher manufacturing costs than the PS4.

4. R&D is very difficult in this regard. R&D was paid, before the first console ships. As R&D cost is paid beforehand, the number of units sold influencing strongly how much R&D cost is reflected in the cost of each console unit. But we can see the following: PS4 and Xbox One have pretty standard PC architecture. They don't do very extraordinary things that need much R&D, except maybe the Kinect in the Xbox One. PS3 had immense R&D cost. Developing the Cell processor and programming tools for it was complicated. Nintendo used with Gamecube, Wii and WiiU a PowerPC-processor, but always added own instruction sets. So their CPUs were not as expensive as the Cell in the PS3 but probably had more R&D cost than the CPUs in PS4, Xbox One and X360. Wii and WiiU had added R&D costs for their inputs and ways to integrate them into controllers and use them for gaming. As they utilized non-standard ways for gaming, there were lots of trials involved, not needed for more traditional gaming. Now Switch integrates a lot of different input-schemes and ways to play. These include standard ways, which probably were not as intensive in R&D, but also innovative ways to play, which probably involved a lot of headaches. This all probably adds up to immense R&D costs. Including R&D WiiU and Vita probably were easily the most expensive console of younger time. Both were not as easy and standard as the PS4 is for example, but both also sold pretty bad and therefore R&D cost for each unit is quite high.

Overall you see, these calculations of summing up parts is saying exactly nothing about the actual costs of consoles.

Now for games. I wasn't misleading at all. I pretty much said, the costs depend on the game in question, not on the platform. So RDR2 probably had very high budget. It was developed for a long time and had a lot of manpower. Giving a ballpark estimate on costs for developing a game is actually a lot easier than it is for consoles. Because cost for software is basically: how many people developed on the game for how long. So I actually think Zelda:BOTW was pretty expensive, seeing how long it's development took. If you don't assume only a small team worked on it for most of the time (which would mean Nintendo actually planned the delays), this means it built up quite a lot of cost. In contrast, God of War took four years to develop, Santa Monica Studios have around 200 people, so these at most were working on the title. I heard similar team size for Zelda, but as I said a much, much longer development time. Super Mario Odyssey on the other hand probably was a lot cheaper, it took much less time to develop and had probably also a smaller team size. So as I said (non-misleading at all): It depends on the game in question, not on the platform.