In their last financial report, Sony once again committed to beating the PS4's FY14 shipments, by the end of their current fiscal year. It will be interesting to see how much Sony can ship from December to March after much lower than expected sales in November. While the console market isn't huge over there, I wonder what are the chances that Sony allocated shipments to China, rather than Europe, NA or Japan. 

It seems that December will be down for all 3 consoles, Switch compared to December 2020 and PS5/Xbox Series compared to Ps4/Xbone back in December 2014.

And what, they are going to just sit on 5-10 mostly to completely made Switch 2 games? If they, back in 2017, were planning on releasing Switch 2 in 2023, which would line up with their usual 5-6 year life cycle model, then they probably had the launch year games for Switch 2 mapped out back in 2019 at the latest, with development starting shortly after. Those teams have been spending resources on making their games and I doubt Nintendo will want to sit on that many finished games that could be released and making them profit (which they make a lot more from than selling hardware, collectively). 

Something to note. this post  The user in this post (someone with access to NPD reports, but has toned down leaks/hints in the past few years) confirmed that the OLED model crashed in Nov vs Oct.  We cannot define what that means, but we know that the OLED sold >314K in Oct straight from Nintendo's mouth, so the implication is that Oct > 314K > Nov for OLED. 

@trunkswd - in case that helps with ASP related extrapolations.

It’s not even clear to me that the X|S will fall behind the Xbox one this year yet. 

the Series consoles are going to destroy the Xbox One in lifetime sales barring unforeseen weird circumstances. 

What is the 4M gap based on?

The last official update from Sony had the PS5 at 13.4 Million versus the PS4 at 13.8 Million launch aligned. Sony also reiterated that they will beat the PS4's FY2014 numbers by the end of their fiscal year. 

In their last earnings call, Sony has reiterated they are committed to beating the PS4's FY14 by the end of their current fiscal year, despite the PS5 falling behind its predecessor, and the semi conductor shortages impacting supply. The Bloomberg report that claims Sony has cut down PS5 production, still has the PS5 slightly out pacing the PS4 launch aligned, 16M down to 15M units versus 14.8M units. 

With the kind of demand the PS5 is seeing, a substantial lead for the PS4 can be withered down in months, especially with HFW & GT7 launching early 2022.

Idk which games you are talking about cause the next Zelda, Mario, Splatoon, Pokemon, Next level games, Kirby and probably a new DK are all going to be on Switch. if they planned some things back in 2019, it was for the next titles and they can just push spread their lineup a little more than what they anticipated if a delay happens. I don't see how any of their main teams working on a launch title rn except maybe Metroid Prime 4 and the Mario Kart team but other than that.. they are already mobilized for the Switch.

Work on next gen will definitely start next year tho and maybe some teams started this year. Thing is, i think they will go the same route as current gen and put their next titles on both the Switch and the new system. That has been rumoured for a bit now. Heck, i even think the successor will be introduced as a Super Switch and will just slowly take over until the Switch and Oled are discontinued in 2024.

Games take 3-5 years to make. That means if they were planning to release Switch 2 in 2023 dating back to 2017 based on their historical cycles, then games for launch window of Switch 2 would have to start being made no later than 2020 but as early as 2018 (if a bigger game). The few games we know are coming for Switch 1 like Botw 2, MP4, etc. don't paint the full picture of what they have going on behind the scenes. There is no way they could start working on games next year 2022 with the hope of launching in time for 2023, which I'm sure they were initially aiming for. They plan their cycles out years ahead of time, it is entirely too inefficient and resource wasting to delay consoles based on the idea of squeezing the milk to the last drop. They'd rather sell 20 million Switch 2's in a year than an additional 10 million Switch 1's by delaying Switch 2, I guarantee that.

Also, the reason the ports did so well on Switch from Wii U is because hardly anyone bought Wii U's (I did). Those games had huge sales potential on a much more popular device. Porting Switch 1 games to Switch 2 may still be worth it, but they won't sell nearly as much as the Wii U Ports because Switch has fantastic sales and most that wanted to experience those games will have already.

The problem is assuming Nintendo planned a 5-6 year console cycle when they have explicitly stated otherwise.