I got the hook up for you, bro.

Edit: Hmm. Didn't format correctly. Bear with me a bit. Well, I can't seem to get the table to be a more reasonable width, so I just combined the two and added 2006 figures for the PS2.

Wow, those pre-lite DS numbers are atrocious, , especially March/April 2005, where it only did low XBO, even almost Wii U numbers. Really didn't think it would have done that bad at the time

Yeah. The DS did relatively poorly prior to the release of the Lite. To compare it to other Nintendo handhelds plus the Switch:

Overall, it sold only 2.58M in all of 2005. Meanwhile, the GBA sold 4.75M in 2001, the 3DS sold 4.11M in 2011, and the Switch sold 4.89M in 2017.

Hard to say. The Switch being up YoY since March is clearly an artificial bubble fueled by the outbreak (the PS4 & XBO likewise saw big YoY jumps). It's YoY improvements had been generally trending downward, and it was even down YoY in January & February (assuming the best-guess estimates on Era weren't way under the mark). Those are signs that a system is closing in on the post-peak part of its life cycle. It's entirely possible that the recent console-buying bubble could front-load sales for this year, drawing away sales from later on this year. A lot of people that were waiting for this holiday to buy a Switch may have already bought one with their stimulus money. Even if that's not the case, it's still entirely possible that once this bubble is deflated that the Switch could be back to being flat or even down YoY.

Over 2.3M Switches have been sold in the U.S. in the March-May period, the second-largest non-holiday 3-month period ever after the DS's 2.44M sold in the April-June period, and one of the biggest YoY jumps ever. It's also far better than the Switch's previous best non-holiday 3-month period of a bit over 1M in Jan.-March 2019 (that's excluding the Switch's actual first three months; it sold 1.35M in that time span, but two-thirds of that were in just launch month). This sort of anomalous spike could serve to deplete the remaining pool of future buyers. There's only so many people willing and able to buy any given system, after all, and something unexpected that encourages them to buy it sooner rather than later could result in worse sales further down the road than what might have otherwise happened.

Individual games rarely produce long-term increases to baseline sales. That goes for the latest Animal Crossing as well. In Japan, where AC:NH is one of the most successful games ever and appears to be the biggest system-seller for any system ever, the effect on sales was short-lived. Sure, it produced one of the best sales weeks for any system ever in Japan (and the biggest outside of the December holidays or launch weeks), but just three weeks later sales were back down to baseline levels, with said baseline not appearing any higher than the previous baseline. Even in the U.S., I can't seem to find a single instance of any individual game released in the past three generations producing any detectable gains for a period lasting more than two monthly sales periods (and in some cases those gains may have been assisted by other factors like price cuts). Usually you just see a spike in sales the month the game is released (and since U.S. sales are tracked monthly instead of weekly like in Japan, it takes a particularly big system-seller to make itself obvious in the data).

As for the PS4 & XBO, of course their COVID boosts haven't been as big, because they're old systems nearing the ends of their lives (five months to go until replacement). While demand was temporarily up as people got their stimulus checks, overall demand is down so sales may not be as high in absolute terms as they could have been if they were close to their peaks. Also, the total number of systems in the supply channel isn't going to be as big as it once was because shipments decline in late life, so there is likely less supply to meet the recent increase in demand. Even then, though, this past April was the second-biggest non-holiday month ever for the PS4, and tied with October 2016 (One S launch month) for biggest non-holiday month ever for the XBO. The PS4 and XBO were up 178% and 210%, respectively, from April 2019. Not as big as the Switch's 256%, but still massive.

Now, for March the Switch was up 161% from February, while for the PS4 and XBO their gains were 79% and 70%, respectively (March is usually down from February barring other factors). That's a much larger disparity than for April, which is where we are likely seeing an effect from AC:NH, but the smaller proportional gap in April suggests the AC effect wearing off. For May, the PS4 and XBO were down -62% and -54% from April, respectively, while the Switch was down only 34%, but with us being this far out from AC's release, I'd say it's more likely that we're seeing the effects of stock come into play after weeks of artificially increased demand for consoles.

Given the typical short-term effects of system-sellers as well as the observed effects of COVID-19 and the resulting windfalls from stimulus, the vast majority of the Switch's gains can be attributed to that, and not to Animal Crossing. There is no reason to assume that AC will by itself be capable of enhancing Switch sales for a long period of time. It didn't do so in Japan, and, especially given the external factors at play, there's no reason to think the situation is any different in the U.S.

I didn't know the Switch was still supply-constrained in Japan, but if it is then that's even less of a reason to think that Animal Crossing will be a long-term system-seller there, at least in a way that would be detectable in the data. Yes, the game itself will keep selling for a long time just like other big Nintendo titles that just keep selling (MK8D, Splatoon 2, and Smash 5 have stayed in the Top 10 despite their age), but A) its long-term sales will always be much lower than in the initial wave, and B) its ability to keep selling copies does not translate to capacity to keep moving hardware. Over time, the impact of a single game's ability to move hardware diminishes, normally only causing an increase in hardware sales for a few weeks; such an increase manifests as a big initial spike followed by diminishing HW sales that settle back down to baseline levels. Normally, HW sales are back down to baseline in 5-6 weeks, usually sooner. Most people that got a Switch just to play AC have done so by now.

And in all but two cases that I can find, a single game just doesn't have the capacity to cause a measurable long-term increase in baseline sales. The only clear example I've seen in the sales data from Japan was Splatoon for the Wii U. FF7 was the lone example in the U.S., and it initiated the start of a massive increase in PS1 sales in the latter third of 1997 (though it's hard to say how many people bought a PS1 just for FF7; apparently it sold about 3M copies lifetime in the U.S., over 500k in just September '97 alone, while the PS1 itself sold 30M copies, so it was probably more of an indirect system-seller in that it helped draw significant attention to the system and its larger library and lower software prices). Aside from those two games, every other increase in baseline sales in both regions, for both handhelds and home systems, was associated with a price cut and/or new hardware model.

Considering that sort of track record for games to have long-term capacity to boost sales, I doubt AC:NH would be able to affect months-long increases to baseline sales even if stock wasn't an issue. It may have had a somewhat longer effect than normal due to the absolute size of the initial spike, but even then now that the game is three months old the baseline likely would have settled back down to the pre-AC level by this point. Supposedly, Switch production is returning to normal, so we'll have to see what sales look like over the next few months, but I'm honestly not expecting some dramatic increase in baseline sales beyond what it's been averaging since the release of the Lite. Maybe 60-75k on average until the holidays. I know some people have been very bullish on the Switch, but I am tempering my expectations. I'm not expecting it to completely drop off a cliff any time soon (though I think a noticeable YoY drop next year is likely), but neither am I expecting it to smash all sales records.