Topic: Critical time for switch

Man I can't wait to come back to this post after Mario is released. Unluckily for you and rest of the doom and gloom merchants who predicted it would flop it's sold very well.. doesn't need to create hype like the Wii did.

@kobashi100 Why would you? The Switch will continue to sell well through until the New Year.

I'm sure the Switch is meeting expectations. Would be nice to see some updated units sold figures from Nintendo (not Shipped). The last we had was in July with 4.7 million. The last "update" we had from unofficial sources was in September at just over 5 million. Call it 5.2. In that case, we are looking at an average of 250,000 sales worldwide per month. That will get a bump from Odyssey, but even being pessimistic, Switch should still reach 6 million by the end of the year.

http://www.vgchartz.com/article/269374/switch-sales-top-an-es...

You do like getting some flak, don't you? I agree with you in some respects - I've not heard anything much (if at all) about the Switch in the real world. However, I'd argue that the only consoles to ever really break into the mainstream consciousness were the Wii and, possibly, the Game Boy - yet the DS and PS2 sold more than either of them, without anything like the same cultural impact. The video game community is lucrative, in business terms, but it's still a bubble. The bestselling console of all time is supposedly the PS2, at around 155m+, but that's still just a tiny fraction of the world's consumers.

In the current generation of home consoles, there are roughly 60m PS4s, 25m Xbones and a smattering of Wii Us - let's say 100m consumers, and that's assuming there's no overlap in ownership (which there is). Nintendo can really only target that sector. However, the Switch is uniquely placed in that it is also portable. Most gamers are more likely to have a portable and a home console than two home consoles; many prefer portable gaming to home gaming; others prefer to play at home. The Switch is the only console that caters to ALL of those segments. Admittedly, there are more powerful home consoles (though not portables, unless you count tablets) - but no other console combines those formats. It's a very powerful market proposition. Throw in a unique software library, as is ever the case with Nintendo hardware, and there's no reason not to be optimistic over the future of the Switch. I'm not going to predict sales, because it's nothing more than spitballing, but all early indications certainly suggest it's fair to skew positive for Nintendo.

@Shellcore If we take the official Switch sales at 4.7 million Mar-July, the same time scale following the PS4 launch saw 6 million sold (22% increase). Granted this was a Nov release, so takes into account the more active holiday period. By this point of release (10 months for Switch), PS4 had sold 10 million units over the same period. Realism helps expectations : )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4

Doom & Rocket League are the biggest titles coming to switch!
Doom is switch's 1st FPS game & it will have online multiplayer. This will be a big holiday seller as well as Rocket League. RL was confirmed to be only $20 !!!! at that price RL will have the same attachment rate as zelda BOTW. no way gamers are passing that up.

If these two titles fail then il be worried LOL

Of course it's a critical time but no more than any time is a critical time.

I think we've nothing to fear about with the success of Switch though. It has incredible momentum & will easily hit 10 million plus by the end of March.

@Shellcore Those numbers are wrong. The last official numbers from Nintendo were 4.7 million as of June 30th.

Japanese and US sales for the month of July provided by Media Create and NPD put the total at around 5.2 million. Add in the rest of the world and it should be ~5.4 million.

It's well past 6.5 million by now. We'll see what the official numbers are as of the end of September when Nintendo's financial results get reported later this month.

It's selling a lot faster than you suggested. Also, VGChartz is not a reliable source in the slightest.

Switch should be well past 10 milion by the end of the year, and pretty damn close to Wii U's LTD sales by the end of the fiscal year in March.

It's a critical time for my wallet!

Hard to say its a critical time based on two sports games. Weigh up how they've done after Christmas when Switch starts to reach outside early adopters. Give Skyrim, Doom, LA Noire, Rocket League and WWE a look at that stage as well.

Western third-party games are in a Catch 22 really. Anybody who genuinely wants COD, Battlefield, Destiny, GTA, Assassin's Creed etc. has a system to play them on. PS4 and XB1 have been out nearly 4 years now. Even if there are people who want those games they are unlikely to buy a Switch this Christmas even if it had all this year's big AAA's as the other two systems have a backlog as well. Switch can't compete.

So the market for third-party games is really two groups.

1) Buyers who will skip other versions for the Switch version or double dip because of portability. We're in uncharted territory as there's never been a portable this close to current Gen home systems so nobody knows how big this market is.

2) Nintendo only gamers. By definition this group is a hard sell as they want Nintendo games and if they wanted Western third-party games they would have bought a system to play then on. Filter out those who will use the relative quality of other versions, the price of other versions,the age of other versions as reasons not to buy ports, and that market could be very small. The historic struggles of third-party games on Nintendo systems suggests so.

Of course if switch continues to sell, and my own anecdotal experience suggests mass-market and non-gamer interest growing, there will be demand for some third-party support but it's going to have to be carefully chosen compared to PS4/XB1/PC. Switch won't be able to command the same level of third-party support and in reality a lot of people probably won't be bothered. That's OK. Switch is mainly targeting the 3DS/Wii U and Vita/companions system markets and there's lots of sales potential there. Western AAA's will be a plus of they come but they won't define whether Switch succeeds or fails.

Key to selling Switch is and always will be exclusives which really means Nintendo games. Nintendo needs to keep them coming and get Switch to a stage where the numbers are so big third-parties can't ignore it completely.

Maybe it is coming to a critical stage but it's next year. And the important issues are what Nintendo has lined up and how dignified a burial they can give 3DS.

*I'm talking mainly about Western third-party support because switch is going to clean up in Japan and Japanese publishers will come on board.

Amen to that! Haha! Gotta make some tough life decisions.

A lot of good points being made. And hey, I'm a Wii U owner and was a PS/Xbox gamer for the entirety of the Gamecube and Wii eras - I love me some healthy doses of Nintendo doom and gloom as much as the next rabid gamer, but the Switch has a real good feel to it right now. There's something special about this product, and yea, anybody has to admit it's gonna sell like like gangbusters all through the holiday due to Odyssey, but I think it has legs even after that.

I think we'll see something around 7 mil sales when we get official numbers through September, maybe approaching 8 mil. With stock being caught up and Odyssey mere weeks away, I don't think it's crazy to predict a holiday season (late Oct. through Dec., nearly 3 months) of around 5 mil in sales, putting totals around 11-13 mil by the time 2018 rolls around (which is scary close to the TOTAL number of Wii Us sold, period lol). That still gives them January and February to sell another 1 or 2 mil.

So yea, maybe 20 mil is the moonshot, but 15 is amazing nonetheless. And to think - that would pretty much be the total sales of your previous system in just one year.

@rallydefault They're limited by how many units they can produce. I think their original forecast was something like 10 million, but I believed they raised it. Since they sell through most of their stock pretty quickly, I think they will exactly sell how many units they predict they're going to sell, essentially how many units they can get in stores before the fiscal year ends.

I'm shocked - SHOCKED, I tell you - that people who don't play video games are not excited about Nintendo's new video-game-playing machine.

@Octane
Yea, I agree. Even though they've caught up with demand for now, I think we're gonna see lots of stories of Switches being sold out again during the holidays, so they're only going to sell as many as they can make. I think Nintendo's plan with the March release all along was to have holiday 2017 function as a sort of second launch. One launch with Zelda, one launch with Mario.

I do actually agree that it's critical time, but that time is more to decide whether they will be massively or moderately successful. But even then, long term I'm certain we're looking at somewhere between Xbox One and PS4 for success.