Easy. Price cuts and new hardware models.

We see it time and time again: a system gets a big price cut or has a major hardware revision, and its sales experience a period of protracted sales growth. While not all price cuts or hardware revisions have the same effects on sales, they are the only thing absolutely proven to cause sales growth for a period of many months. Meanwhile, software seems to have only a short-term impact on sales growth. Over and over and over and over again, we see individual games boosting hardware sales for a month or two at most (Splatoon in Japan being the sole confirmed outlier to this). A single game, or even several games released closely together, has never had anywhere close to the impact that big price cuts have had.

Sometimes a system does experience periods of growth in the absence of a price cut or hardware revision, but such growth has never been conclusively tied to the release of any one or several games.

....Now that Nintendo’s dedicated handhelds are no more, in the current landscape, having a hybrid console makes both consumer types get the only Nintendo system available...

I ignored nothing. In fact, if you actually read my post you'd see that I addressed them. I pointed out that the graphs were based on VGC data, which may be good if you're looking for a ballpark estimate, but which often has considerable margins of error when compared to "official" sales trackers, at least for monthly/weekly sales (which is why it's widely considered to not be a sufficiently reliable data source). When looking at NPD and Media Create data, that supposed long-term Mario Kart 8 spike for the Wii U that Mnemeth tried to point out doesn't actually exist in the U.S. or Japan. It may or may not exist in Europe, but there's no way to confirm it as there is no publicly available data from official trackers that's granular enough to be of any use.

As for 2021, we haven't gotten NPD numbers yet, but if the Switch is still carrying momentum from last year in the U.S., well, the obvious answer is that demand for consoles is still elevated because of the pandemic, plus there was a $600 stimulus check that most people got. In Japan there was some big gains, and it seems that the culprit was the state of emergency declared in January. The pandemic is still the primary driver of increased demand at this point. People's spending habits have not returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Easy. Price cuts and new hardware models.

We see it time and time again: a system gets a big price cut or has a major hardware revision, and its sales experience a period of protracted sales growth. While not all price cuts or hardware revisions have the same effects on sales, they are the only thing absolutely proven to cause sales growth for a period of many months. Meanwhile, software seems to have only a short-term impact on sales growth. Over and over and over and over again, we see individual games boosting hardware sales for a month or two at most (Splatoon in Japan being the sole confirmed outlier to this). A single game, or even several games released closely together, has never had anywhere close to the impact that big price cuts have had.

Sometimes a system does experience periods of growth in the absence of a price cut or hardware revision, but such growth has never been conclusively tied to the release of any one or several games.

I don't deal with assertions. I only deal with facts. If someone can find somewhere in sales data from official trackers (NPD, Media Create, Famitsu, GfK/Chart Track, etc.) where a game (or several closely-released games) causes an obvious long-term increase in sales, well, I'm all ears. But nobody had yet to prove it. There's more than sufficient proof that price cuts and new models cause long-term sales growth. The only other thing that has clearly caused significant growth for a period of many months was a pandemic that forced people to change their spending habits, including spending more on video games. Meanwhile, in digging through generations worth of sales data, the only example I could find of a single game being the only plausible cause of sales growth lasting more than two months was one game on a poorly-selling system, and it only had an impact in one country for maybe three months instead of two.

All I ask is for some proof. Real proof. Specific data points. If all you have is assertions, then by all means don't engage with me any further, because that's all I have to say to you on the matter myself.