As a shareholder with a six figure holding at the time, I didn't expect much from it. Anyone that was super optimistic was probably just a fan with nothing at stake. There was zero reason to be optimistic about it after the Wii U and how Nintendo was conducting business in general.
I more than doubled my money, but it was more out of luck than anything due to coronavirus etc. I can say that I won't be investing in this company again - they're too fickle and have no sense of continuity between systems so the transitions are always rough as fuck (e.g. burning the eshop and virtual console programs to the ground every generation...what the hell? Why???).
Nintendo always feels like one bad decision away from a Wii U again and that's not something I like to see as an investor.
As a fan though, their games are great. Stay as a fan, fuck the investment side of things. Never put money into this company. There are so many better ways to make money.
That's a weird take, I remember thinking it will easily sell 10 million in it's first year back in January 2017.
It was simply a much better device than the 3DS or Wii U, better marketing and had a better launch year line-up than the combined 1st-year line-ups of the 3DS and Wii U. Breath of the Wild would sell the system to the West, Splatoon 2 would sell the system to Japan and everything else was gravy.
A lot of people were underplaying the Switch prior to the launch - "soft launch", "whoever wanted Mario Kart 8 already played it", "whoever wants BotW can play it on the Wii U", "Splatoon 2 isn't a sequel", "Wii U 2", "too expensive". But at the end of the day the hybrid form factor coupled with a strong year one 1st Party line-up, supplemented by indies, Minecraft, Skyrim, sports games ended up being more than enough to sell it at $299 and maintain this price well beyond what everyone expected(I would have thought they would need to drop the price by now).
Finally from very early on it was clear that they were selling the hardware at a profit, something other hardware manufacturers aren't able to achieve, they also revealed that there would be an online sub at some point, which basically meant an additional source of revenue.
Not sure why you as an investor didn't expect much, but I guess you aren't tracking the popularity of franchises like Splatoon in Japan and how a new IP could revitalize the interest in dedicated video game devices in Japan. At the end of the day Switch consolidating the Japanese video game market is something I thought would happen very early on in it's life. By consolidating the 3rd largest video game market they would always have a niche, which in turn would be the reason 3rd Parties would be compelled to port things to their device. This happened with indies, Minecraft, and smaller publishers - Japanese 3rd Parties are only now really coming around on the device and this fall actually has a strong line-up of 3rd Party games for the Switch. It's still amazing that Witcher 3 is on the Switch, while some of Japan's biggest franchises' latest installments aren't.