Topic: Next Nintendo Direct?

@Bolt_Strike
Highly selling games are mostly not appealing for me since I have very different interest in gaming.
Games like xenoblade, splatoon, botw, metroid, etc will not working on me.
But, games like My Little Pony, My Universe games, cartoonish games by OG Games, etc will working on me.
Talking about games quantity I can pick, even without best selling games, my games are mostly consist the unpopular games with at least more than 50 different titles.
I have registered some upcoming games from trailers I found and even without the highest selling games, I'm already content with just smaller or unpopular games.

I think Pokemon Legends Arceus, Switch Sports, Splatoon 3 and Pokemon Scarlet/Violet will be the 10+ million sellers this year.

@westman98 I did some research on this based on that Wikipedia link I provided and that's slightly off. First off, here are some comparisons between the total sales for each years (note that it's based on games which have sold 1+ million and it's lifetime, so it's not really accurate how much sales actually occurred that year, but it does give you a good idea of which high sellers released in what year):

2017- 126.88 million
2018- 79.97 million
2019- 86.27 million
2020- 73.12 million
2021- 58.16 million

I did some estimates, and 2022 should be around 54.04 million. Now that is a continual drop off which is to be expected as popularity constantly decreases over time, so in that metric the lineup should be good, but in terms of the number of big titles, let's look at that further. I'm going to define 2 tiers of "big" titles based on sales, the higher tier being games that have sold 10+ million and a middle tier of games that sold 3-10 million. Here are the results for that:

2017:
Top tier: 4 (BotW, MK8D, Splatoon 2, Mario Odyssey)
Mid tier: 2 (1-2 Switch and Minecraft)
Total: 6

2018:
Top tier: 3 (Super Mario Party, LGPE, Smash Ultimate)
Mid tier: 3 (Kirby Star Allies, Tropical Freeze, Mario Tennis Aces)
Total: 6

2019:
Top tier: 4 (NSMBUD, Ring Fit Adventure, Luigi's Mansion 3, Pokemon SwSh)
Mid tier: 3 (Mario Maker 2, Fire Emblem Three Houses, Link's Awakening)
Total: 7

2020:
Top tier: 1 (ACNH)
Mid tier: 6 (Clubhouse Games, Paper Mario: The Origami King, Super Mario 3D All Stars, Momotaro Densetsu, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, Among Us)
Total: 7

2021:
Top tier: 1 (Pokemon BDSP)
Mid tier: 4 (3D World + Bowser's Fury, Monster Hunter Rise, Skyward Sword HD, Mario Party Superstars), and Metroid Dread may soon join this list
Total: 5

Now here's what I have projected for 2022:
Top tier: 2 (Pokemon LA, Pokemon SV)
Mid tier: 3 (Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Mario Strikers: Battle League, Splatoon 3)
Total: 5

Now I may be slightly undercounting Splatoon 3, that has a chance of making top tier, but it doesn't affect the results much. 2022 is projected to have the lowest number of high selling games, and in fact things really dropped off after the pandemic with Animal Crossing (which was originally intended to be 2019 anyway) and Pokemon pretty much carrying Nintendo sales wise. Other than that, sales have been okay but not great since the pandemic. So yeah, I would say this is evidence that we're a bit short on higher selling IPs.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, here are my rough predictions for sales for the games that haven't released yet:

Nintendo Switch Sports- 2.5 million
Mario Strikers: Battle League- 3 million
Xenoblade Chronicles 3- 1.75 million
Splatoon 3- 8.5 million
Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes- 1 million
Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope- 1.5 million
Bayonetta 3- 1 million
Pokemon Scarlet/Violet- 18.5 million
Advance Wars 1 + 2 Reboot Camp- 1 million

@Grumblevolcano I think you're being a bit generous here. The two Pokemon games will get 10+ for sure but I have questions about Splatoon 3 and Switch Sports cracking 10+. Splatoon 3 will suffer from being a mid gen sequel and those tend to do worse, so I could see it falling a tad short. And the Wii Sports games haven't been 10+ since the Wii and dropped off a cliff on the Wii U, the Wii fad seems to be over and I don't see it coming anywhere near 10. I'd even call it a success if it reaches 3+.

@Bolt_Strike

Do you count F2P games (Fortnite, Pokémon Unite etc.)?

@Bolt_Strike Splatoon 3 I think will depend on what separates it from Splatoon 2 (hence why I said maybe), it if manages to stay fresh then I could see it be over 10 million. As for Switch Sports, the charts show Switch Sports still having strong momentum. I think the big thing will be about when Golf launches and the timeline for modes beyond that.

@Screen Those are a little more complicated to chart because the monetization is different. I don't think they're being tracked. And even if there were, there are no new ones this year.

@Bolt_Strike And that's all without you mentioning the switch's killer app, Kirby.

@Bolt_Strike

Does Fall Guys count?

I know it released 2 years ago, but it did get 20 million downloads.

Unite got almost 100 million (last update was 70 million)

Potential spoilers for tomorrow's Partner Showcase:

@Screen
Free to play games should be counted differently. Because they're free so a lot of people give them a spin just to see what they're about

@Fizza HAHA you are so right. I just saw it myself. Jeez

Why the heck do people think Bayo 3, Mario + Rabbids, or (most egregiously) Metroid have any chance of showing up tomorrow? It's a third party showcase, yeesh.

The sheer number of tweets I'm seeing about the prime remaster getting announced tomorrow is starting to genuinely piss me off. People are literally working themselves up into a frenzy about something that's impossible, and will complain for the next couple of weeks when it doesn't happen.

@link3710 Bayonetta 3 and Mario + Rabbids fits into the same categories as Shin Megami Tensei V and Age of Calamity respectively which both appeared in a Partner Showcase. Metroid Prime however has no chance and people are setting themselves up for disappointment.

@link3710
Mario and Rabbids is developed and published by Ubisoft.
Bayonetta is still owned by Sega, and developed by Platinum. It's just funded by Nintendo as of the second game, so it's a possibility.

Also if you're genuinely getting pissed at Metroid Prime rumors...you probably shouldn't be on any social media platform or forum that has the presence of Nintendo fans.
We speculate, speculate, speculate, because it's fun and it's funny to see people get mad over not getting something Nintendo never promised.

Is it stupid? Yes.

That sentence ended long ago.

@Bolt_Strike I'm not sure where you got those numbers from. Those 2017 software figures in particular are way too high given that Nintendo only sold 63 million copies of software in total (1st + 3rd party) during that particular fiscal year.

Here are software sales of 1st and 3rd party Switch games by fiscal year:

FY3/2022 numbers are incomplete since this particular graphic only goes up to September 2021.

We do know that FY3/2022 Switch software sales ended up at 235 million copies, so we can estimate that 110-120 million of that figure came from Nintendo 1st party games.

@link3710
Peoples get upset for hoping the bigger games rumour (botw2, metroid prime 4)
I personally take it easy as I have no interest with those bigger games and keep hunting the smaller games / unpopular games.
Well, I have no hurt feeling since I'm playing completely different games.

@westman98 Read my note again. I took it from a Wikipedia page listing all 1+ million dollar sellers (which they in turn took from the most recent earning reports for each game) and I listed the total sales to date based on the launch year. There are some inaccuracies, yes (for example I counted MK8D as 45.33 million in 2017, but it didn't sell all of those copies in 2017), but it gives you a pretty good idea of which of the bigger games sold when.

@Bolt_Strike
Seems like a pretty seriously flawed way to track 1st party software sales since many of the Switch's biggest sellers move copies thanks to strong legs rather than just big launch sales.

For example, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe sold ~9 million copies by the end of 3/2018, but is currently sitting at ~45 million copies sold as of 3/2022. That means the vast majority of its sales come from outside it's launch year.

@westman98 Maybe, but again I'm not sure they differences mean much in this situation. Most of the IPs. 8 million in one year is still pretty huge. On the other hand, we also had Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle that same year and they had a similar opportunity to build sales year after year, but they couldn't even crack 3 million. So that definitely implies that there isn't a lot of interest in those IPs period and their sequels releasing this year don't have a chance of surpassing them.