Ask AI if AI is gonna keep making chips insanely expensive for decades to come. Then you'll have your answer.
PS5 ain't at 100m and is now limping cuz of price raises. And there is no way in hell the PS6 is gonna sell anything close to PS5 if market conditions/trajectories stay the same. What's the market for a $900 PS6, which is over $1000 a year or two after launch, with probably $80 games? Not very big.
Switch2's first 12 months on the market are easily going to be it's best and it will also be limping by the time it hits 100m, and might not even hit that number at all if it succumbs to annual price raises like the other systems have. We've already seen Japan sales crater with baseline half of what it was since the price raise. And Japan was the one place where Switch2 sales continued to do really well after the launch hype faded a year ago. Imagine how many people are gonna want to buy a $600 Switch2 in a couple years...not many! Get ready for S2 annual sales to be in the 10-15m range.
Beyond that, it just depends on if systems and games can get back to being affordable or not. Honestly doubt they will. Even if the AI effect on chips subsides at some point, I don't think prices will go back down to $300-$500 affordable systems. At best, if AI-chip-doom subsides, the future will probably consist of expensive systems that maybe get a $50-$100 price cut during their lifetimes (with gens probably last 12+ years), and so never actually become affordable.
So, nah, I don't see any system getting close to DS/Switch/PS2 numbers in the foreseeable future. 100m is gonna be a huge target for any very successful system to hit. PS5 will hit it because it got in a few years before chip prices went crazy, Switch2 might hit it but if so it'll barely do it probably ending up around Wii/PS1, after that I think 100m will be pretty hard to hit.
