The PS2 kept selling after the PS3 was launched.
As I remember the first 3 PS consoles sold around a third of their units after releasing their successor. Not sure if Nintendo ever achieved that with any home console or portable, at least in recent generations. I'd bet that like MS they transition faster to the new generation discontinuing a console faster once its successor gets released when compared to PS.
Fair enough.
All I’m saying is it would have to be a pretty
sharp drop off suddenly whimper out at around 110-20 million. It’s best year (I think, happy to be corrected) was 28 million and certainly helped by Covid.
Are people really expecting sales to simply halve?
All game consoles have a sales curve: starts selling low during the first year or so and their yearly sales keep growing until reaching a peak around its 3rd (aprox, depends on the console/portable) year. And then, after that peak the yearly sales keep decreasing year after year, until when their sales are pretty low and their successor gets released. Not too far (exclusing exception like the PS consoles) after the successor release they get discontinued.
Depending on each console, that yearly sales curve get higher o smaller, wider or thinner, but they all make that curve. People (including Nintendo's estimation) originally thought Switch was going to start to decrease after its peak during the last year. but covid happened (combined with their competition being in a generational transitioin year -which means low sales for them- and at the same time getting fucked by chips shortage), so it got a big push so its peak year was last year instead of the previous one. Now after the peak is decreasing, and every year is supposed to keep decreasing because it's basically what always happens in consoles where they pass their peak year. It isn't realistic to expect it to have huge sales every year forever.
And on top of that now the chips shortage also starts to impact Switch too. They said that will have to decrease their estimated production (which alread considered a YoY decrease) in 20% only due to this.