Hi @PAOerfulone Thank you very much for your kind welcome. 

Thank you also for such a wonderful reply!

1)I see why this would be the case, I was not counting month totals like that, so this definitely changes some of my estimates.

2) I am very glad I could help, if maybe there are some other numbers you need double checking, count on me, I enjoy doing that.

3)This is a great response, makes my mind wonder and I want to do some analysis of how this is done. I am in no way an expert of projections so I want to explore this concept very well. It might take some time for me to analyze this but with a first look, it seems like it is inflating the projection a little bit when you get such a wonderful mid year like 2020. 

Thank you for explaining step by step how you do it. I was a perfect explanation. i wonder how this projection has been changing since the beginning of the year. Probably it started much lower then it skyrocketed to something like 35-40 and then it is coming down almost as fast.

Anyways I will hopefully be able to learn much more from you, thank you for your time.

@Mar1217 I agree with you, whatever the switch ends up making this year can only be considered an outstanding result. It is going to be over 40% growth from it's previous year, something that as far as I can tell, no other console has done so in it's fourth year of release (months 37-48). In the chart below you will see how much each console grew from year 3 to year 4. Also you see how much the switch would need to sell in order to match such growth. Basically it only has the PS3 to pass.

It is true that Many nintendo consoles on vgchartz show that they have poor legs, I wish we could see how older consoles did, but it seems likely that it was similar to what happened with the 3ds or the wii. Having said that. the DS is a big exception, as it sold more than any other console (at least the ones we have data on) during the second half of its life cycle. I don't see any reason to believe that the switch will have the future of most nintendo consoles. It should be closer to what the DS did than to what the Wii did. Here is a chart comparing first and second halves of each console based on months released:

WiiU barely made it to the "Second Half"

Sorry, it took me so long to write my post that I didn't see that you meant home consoles. Still, as far as we can tell, only the DS had strong legs. Maybe it was different with older consoles, It is tough to make a statement with over half of the consoles missing from the data.

We need two things: numbers and context.

Nintendo, since 1989, never has one pipeline for software production. It's new territory here. The transition, from Nintendo perspective, seems hard because needs to take four pipelines ( at the same time), the other company has two or three, in the best-case scenario ( Sony abandons Psvita because of that. Focus in Ps4 is a correct path). And the transition has only two. The long span life for Switch is a focus by Nintendo.  Maybe, with luck, the fifth year may become the top year? The new version, a ton of games, and price reduction of older versions? Let's see. 

That Switch is on track to exceed PS4's best year by about 50% is both telling and insane.
By the end of this month, it will probably only need to sell another 50 million for the rest of its lifespan to pass PS4's final sales, which is an average of just 17 million per year for 2021-2023.

Just a quick heads up: I will be out of town for Christmas. These upcoming 5 days, I will be in Dallas, TX, to spend Christmas with my brother, his girlfriend, and their daughter. So, I most likely won't have access to a computer so I can update the tables when the new numbers come in on Thursday. I will certainly try, but I just wanted to let everyone know in case the thread title and OP aren't updated. I should be back by Saturday afternoon and I'll do it then if I don't do it beforehand. Thank you all for your continued interest and support.

Wow!

Thank you @RolStoppable !

Thank you for sharing this data with me. It took me a little while, but I think it has some cool information. 

Regarding the conversation we are having about Nintendo Legs, there are two consoles here that are amazing, the NES and the Gameboy. Both have a little bit of an asterix besides them, but in any way both of them sold a lot, for a long time!

The gameboy sold an insane 3 times more than what it had sold the first 5 years. This one has 2 pieces of key information, the first one, is that these numbers combine the original Gameboy and the Gameboy Color, so a bump is obvious. There is something very important, and that is that the original gameboy had its highest selling year the year before the GBC came out. It was actually increasing in sales. This can easily be explained with the fact that in 1996 Pokemon Red and Blue came out. It is insane how much impact it had in sales. 

Yearly Gameboy units sold

Just to put things in perspective, if the switch would have such growth after year 5, it would sell more than 300 million units....

@Mar1217 Something you might find interesting is how much the NES sold after it's first five years (Actually this is how much it sold after 8 years because it was released much earlier in Japan). Therefore as a console it is a great example of a nintendo console selling well for a long time. 

Now... you will definitely find interesting how poor nintendo home consoles sold after 5 years, percentile wise, 4 of the bottom 5 consoles are nintendo home consoles (Wii, GC, N64, WiiU). 

I find it unbelievable that how bad the N64 sold.... I love that console, with games like SMB64, Mario Kart, Goldeneye, Starfox, Zelda, Mario Party, Waverace (and many others) how did it sell so bad! I just can't imagine how this is possible. 

Anyways, thank you Rol for sharing that link, it is a great insight into the past, obviously it is not like comparing apples with apples, but it gives a general idea.

I see you are doing a lot of analysis of the data, especially what percentage of sales come during a system's 2nd 60 months.  I would ask that you look at the year each of these systems had their sales peak.  I think you will find a strong correlation here.  The systems that peak later tend to have a greater % of sales in the second 60 months.

I am saying this because Switch is obviously peaking later than most Nintendo systems.  If Switch is peaking this year, then we can still expect a large % of sales to be in the second 60 months.

Hi @The_Liquid_Laser Thank you for your idea, it is definitely fun to look at all these different angles, here is the same chart but with the peak years:

A few things to highlight are:

1) GBA had its peak year on year 4 but it still sold much less in the second half. I checked that out and it coincides with the release of the DS on its year 5. 

2)PS4 should be able to climb up this list , even with a slight chance to catch up to X360 and maybe even DS.

3)XONE probably won't reach the 3DS, and the 3DS peaked on its first 12 months.  

4)I still want to know how did the N64 peak so early! I would love it if anyone has sales data for Playstation and Sega consoles. 

5) With regards to the switch, if this is its peak year, and it has similar second half than year 4 consoles, then it should sell about 30 million plus what it sells in 2021, so the end total should be near 130 million.

Here is where I think that it is important to not look at data to predict but rather to question. This was an unprecedented year, the switch is in new territory with it being the only console nintendo is focusing on. It is probable that this ends up being the NS peak year, it increased over 40% from last year. But this doesn't really mean it is going to behave like other consoles did. 

Personally I think the NS should easily be second place on this table.

6) Another extremely important factor that really is not seen here... But maybe I should look into adding it. Is when a new console got released, There are two reasons a console has poor second half. The first is that it simply peaks early like the WiiU, but the second is that a new Console is released like the GBA or even the DS.

Hi @yo33331 Thank you for this information, I would love to see more data from Playstation and Sega, Do you happen to have these sales numbers? I would gladly add them to this list.

If you look at the graph, the Gameboy sold almost 90 million units in it's second life, so it seems like it could potentially be higher than the PS2. But like I mentioned before this is a bit fussy due to the fact that the Gameboy Color is being merged with the Gameboy. 

Also the Wii seems like it was very similar in regards of selling more than its successor during the second life (but that is like cheating because the WiiU sold horrible amounts).

And witht the gameboy asterisk, it sold way way more than the GBA did, According to this chart it sold nearly 90 million in its second life while the GBA sold 22 million in total.

Anyways, thanks for pointing this out, I am sad that there is not that much data on older consoles as it would make it a lot of fun to compare them.