Take for example the NSW and PS4 curves, one can easily spot that they sold at a roughly similar pace but that in the last year NSW began selling at a much faster pace.
Yep, they had a pretty similar curve until Switch's peak went mad, I think that being on the peak covid's bump boosted its sales more. The other consoles were instead in a low part of their sales cycle so there wasn't practically anything to bump, and on top of that had the chips issue. Plus in case of covid, with all the family spending a lot of time at home, with the portable people can play in the bed, while many families may have only a single tv (or the console can be connected to the main one) and the other family members may be fighting to use it. So I think Switch may have been more benefited with covid.
Or compare the Wii curve to the PS4 one, in the latter part the steepness of the two are completely different (in favour of PS4 obviously) therefore PS4 was destined to "effertlessly" surpass Wii total sales.
Yes, after the peak Wii went down faster and got replaced and discontinued faster. This is one of the reasons of why PS4 outsold total Wii sales while ago.
(The quote is a bit out of the original order, I respond first to this argument)
I never said that NSW will have 20M+ sales for every fiscal year until eternity.
I said that currently the NSW selling pace is of a 20M+ console per FY as suggested by Nintendo's forecast of 25M Switch console sold.
My guess is that maybe even the next FY can be 20M+ FY too (BotW2 and Splatoon 3 should launch during that FY).
Covid obviously boosted the NSW sales in the previous FY however I think that even without it NSW was set to sell better than the previous FY (just not as high as 28.83M units).
Obviously any console has a start, a peak and a tail off sales pattern.
It will be interesting to witness what tail off NSW will have because the only chance it has to surpass PS2 and NDS is to have strong sales after the peak year.
Another interesting aspect about the Switch situation is that Nintendo was never forced to use the "price cut" trump card.
In the past for me Switch was easy to predict because like Nintendo I expected it to follow the same yearly sales that PS4 had each that same fiscal year when launch aligned (if ignoring the extra months PS4 had at launch). But now we have covid messing around fucking the economy and delaying games, chips shortages, the Gabe Gear maybe stealing a (small I think) part of their portable/hybrid market, Sony still breaking gaming history records with PS4 and PS5, who knows if streaming or subscription services getting some decent attention before Switch dies, MS maybe making starting comeback in a year and a half from now, no Switch big sellers after Pokemon and BotW2 in the horizon (I think their next ones will be Mario Kart 9 and the next big 3D Mario but I think they may release them as 'crossgen')...
I think in the current FY yes Switch will achieve its target, but after that its sales will drop faster as happened in the other devices, I don't see another 20M year. I thikn BOTW2 will be released at the end of the current FY or at the start of the next one. I think Splatoon 3 will sell way less, and spread over many years.
But in any case I'm sure it won't outsell PS2 and NDS because I think that even if it had this epic peak, it will go back to normal and in 2023-2024 they will release its successor (I'd bet a Super Nintendo Switch, a full BC 4K capable hybrid with hardware similar to the Gabe Boy but with a 1080p display).
No, only some Sony home consoles sold around one third of their sales after their successor has been released and that happen for consoles launched more than 15 years ago, the context now has changed.
I just double checked it and yes, PS3 sold ~15% after PS4, less than I remembered. I thought it was around a third liks PS1 and PS2 achieved. But well, that's still 2 out of 3 being their 'failure' the only exception.
I think SIE is interested in seeking the highest profitability and under that objective they will keep engaged their current active PS4 userbase and share part/most of the software releases between PS4 and PS5, at the same time they will use all their resources to allow the transition of the userbase from PS4 to PS5 as fast as possible.
SIE is aware that the massive profitability they achieved for the first time during the PS4 era is tied to a huge userbase that buy games, microtransactions (a lot of them) and services from their digital ecocystem and also that they are still tied to the concept of a PlayStation box which is why I think they will try to keep alive the software/service part of PS4 (what bring in a lot of money) for users not yet ready to get a PS5 while simultaneously pushing hard to quickly form a strong userbase around PS5 ready to spend money on games, microtransactions (a lot of them) and services on the latest PlayStation box.
Pushing new PS4 hardware sales for people that after 7 years have yet to enter the PS4 ecosystem isn't their priority (because it's not what bring in a lot of profits).
In the coming quarters we will see how the situation will evolve for PS4.
Yep, Sony gets its profit mostly from sofware (1st and specially 3rd party games, apps, subs, dlcs and microtransactions), not from hardware. During the first years Sony consoles are typically sold at a loss and then over time they reduce costs to a point they are sold at a profit, but that profit is way smaller compared to the one from software.
They basically don't care if players have a box of the another one, what they want is to keep players engaged buying games, DLC and so on. As Jim Ryan said, they know that even if they expected to have record sales, the majority of their players need some years to migrate from a generation to the next one. In this case, it may even take more time because they had like 90M MAU on PS4 when PS5 launches (now around 80M) so they knew they had to support PS4 for a while because their players will continue there for a while.
At the same time they will grow the PS5 userbase but won't ignore PS4 until the big majority of players moved to next gen (at that point every PS5 unit sold will generate a nice profit instead of loses).
Switch has broken the record for consecutive NPD wins and that trend could last a long time more given it's momentum and the semi conductor shortage. It effects everyone, but Nintendo must have an easier time procuring parts at this stage than the new consoles.
It will be interesting to see how long Switch can continue to outsell the competition.
I think chips shortages isn't affecting Switch because it has been selling on record numbers and they always had consoles in the stores. PS5 and Series X instead sell way less and it's very rare to find stock and new one get sold quickly.