If Switch 2 can keep up the pace and provide enough stock, it could come out on top; at present I think it's too early to call though, as currently their release schedule looks pretty light, with the only heavy hitter with a confirmed release date being Pokémon and this month + September having only a few significant releases, and no big first party titles.

The holidays will be massive, but from now til mid October sales could slow.

Wouldn't it be pretty terrible for Switch 2 that didn't get a price increase to fail outselling the PS5 which just got a price increase?

Switch 2 is almost certainly going to get a price increase too, question is whether it comes this year, or whether they hold out til next year in order to get the system off to the best possible start.

I also don't expect PS5's $50 bump to hurt it that much.

Switch 2 won't get a price increase this year, which means it would be a big failure for it to not dominate PS5 sales this holiday period.

It isn't weird. While Switch 2 is the successor to one of the best-selling consoles of all-time, this doesn't guarantee that it will smash all records. It's also a more favorable position to be in when you have to revise your forecasts upwards instead of downwards. Pre-order data will certainly factor into Nintendo's forecast, but high initial demand doesn't linearily scale to demand throughout a fiscal year. And while Japanese pre-order numbers were higher than Nintendo expected, the same doesn't need to hold true for the rest of the world where the numbers might fall into exactly the range that Nintendo had anticipated; the thing is that Nintendo has never talked publicly about their expectations, so this can't be quantified.

What might make all of this weird is when you yourself are among the people who got carried away by the question this thread asked and got into the territory of unrealistic expectations, so what is perfectly normal business procedure suddenly appears to be weird. The next substantial updates to this thread's question will come in late October/early November when we can gauge Switch 2's sales momentum as well as the impact that Sony's PS5 price adjustments had. What is pretty much required is that Switch 2 overperforms and the PS5 underperforms, otherwise it's a foregone conclusion; but that has basically been the premise all along.

With GTA6 releasing early in the next fiscal year (assuming no delays), chances are PS5 will perform poorly this year (possible 16 million or lower) and go up significantly next year. A whole year of GTA6 and a potential pricedrop (ignoring that every time I expect a drop, we get a hike instead lol) should make 2026 a really big year for Playstation.

I don't know what Nintendo is thinking and whether their forecast is based on a pessimistic perception of demand or related to production limits. I'm sure they'll sell as many consoles as they can produce if the price doesn't change much.

Is this thread still going?

How it would be the situation if we are talking about sales and not shipments?