You weren't the new 50-75 Million vote while on sarcasm mode, were you?!?

I could, but it wouldn’t be my honest opinion. Unless something like “anything between about 30 million and 330 million” is a legitimate answer. I don’t have any kind of a “gut feeling” here on this one the way I did with the Wii and Switch - because I saw those and almost desperately wanted them. I give it 30 million on the low end with a few assumptions: first, that probably around 20-50% will happily upgrade based solely on just continuing with the platform they’ve invested in. And on the high end, that a large number of people who may have played Switch as a family console or the console of a friend or roommate, now has the opportunity to get a new and up to date one of their own. Of course, these numbers are arbitrary with limited education in the estimation at best. But I’m reasonably confident the Switch will fall within that 30-330 million range.

I’m not trying to be difficult out of any kind of spite or disdain for the question… this is more caution resulting from 20 years of work involving projections and metadata analytics where when I get something wrong, I’m sat in a boardroom with a bunch of stakeholders debating how the projections were so wrong as an indirect way of debating my competence. Nothing more than good old fashioned mental trauma. :)

I think its hard to set a baseline of Switch 2 sales.

How big is the ''core Nintendo audience''? That is hard to answer, given that we know roughly the baseline for a low performing Nintendo home console with Wii U and Gamecube (10-20 million), but that baseline is harder to predict when it comes to a Nintendo hybrid system. It seems going by history that Nintendo has fewer diehard fans that will never stop buying their systems than Sony has with PS for example. Nintendo thus has to hit certain sweetspots to achieve success, good exclusive games, appealing hardware concept, decent third party support, decent price point in order to have a good console generation when it comes to sales potential.

I didn’t realize that your work took you into that realm, and I definitely understand the caution. Especially since we’re talking about Nintendo. Thanks for chiming in with at least a window. 30-330 million sounds like a joke, but knowing Nintendo it really isn’t. Maybe your low is a little low and your high is a lot high, but the sentiment is 100% accurate. I’m sure after the Direct it will be fun to see someone make this thread again to get a new pulse on the projections. 

The are never enough core hardcore fans of any platform not even PS what Sony is good at however is consistently appealing to the mass market outside their core fans, it's this reason why Switch 2 is launching with at least a MK game as that's the biggest mass market game they have. The reason Switch sold is because of what I dub a four market approach it catered adequately to not only portable and home console consumers but also to red and blue ocean consumers while the platform also has the additional hook of a hybrid format.

The issue with looking at GC and WiiU is that the were clear issues in comparison to the more successful platforms but the main one is those platforms were chasing approaches of other platform holders that Nintendo had little understanding of in regards to what droved their success (GC essentially was PS2 lite while WiiU was a pivot from Wii towards PS3/360) where as in stark contrast Wii and Switch weren't trying to be like any other platform they were just being what Nintendo wanted so they understood how to structure themselves and handle the platform, case point is the 3DS it had a rough start but still went on to do 75m as they understood how to approach any crisis management with it.

Switch 2 is effectively following in the footsteps of SNES and 3DS in being one of Nintendo's more direct follow ups to a prior platform historically these have not matched the predecessor's success despite still being successful and tbh with the way the Switch is going I don't think that trend will be broken as Switch is possibly going to be the highest selling platform of all time which quite frankly is a monumental task to repeat back to back, I can see another 100m+ being repeated as a monopoly on one of the four markets helps especially if they go for another 8 to 9 year run but it'll take something otherworldly to better Switch's performance.

So "core Nintendo audience" doesn't include their handheld platforms? Looking at just WiiU and GC completely ignores the third highest selling video gaming ip and highest grossing multimedia ip in history called Pokemon. That's the issue with not treating Nintendo's home and handheld consoles as if they didnt compete for Nintendo's audience is weird. We are now talking about a platform that appeals to both the home amd handheld audience. Nintendo's home and handheld consoles conbined definitely prove Nintendo has a very large core audience maybe even larger than PSs I could argue. Nintendo's handheld audience is made of Mario, Pokemon, Animal Crossing, etc fans not portable fans. Those portable players play for the GAMES, if it was the portability then Vita wouldn't have sold worse than WiiU.

172,400,000.

-Better 3rd party support from the get-go
-7.5% increase in world population
-Sticking to a successful blueprint
-Adding a small percentage of Xbox and Playstation (2%-5%(picking a safe range)) gamers refusing to go all digital on next consoles (40,000,000+115,000,000 respectively = 155,000,000 resulting in 3,100,000-7,750,000 additional customers).

If the economy was stronger, calculations would allow for well over 180,000,000.

*Other calculations not shown for coming up with my guess

30- 50 million LTD is the absolute floor for Switch 2 if it failed like the WiiU. 

The crazy thing is that a 30M selling Switch 2 would be around the same sales as Xbox series X/S, but instead of getting every game ported over to it like Xbox series X/S got, Switch 2 would probably get zero third party support if it sold only 30M units.

Yeah tbh Switch 2 could sell double that and they would be reluctant to port anything over they'd just be forced to as they wouldn't be able to justify to share holders why they've not approached a significant userbase.