After you posted all those arguments, can you precise exactly what "then a price drop should accelerate sales a ton" means exactly, to you ? What will be the effect on the future Switch baseline, 6 months after the Switch Lite is released for example ? What if your prediction doesn't happen and the Switch Lite won't change much of the current baseline (~10k or so after launch hype) ? Will it confirm the decline I'm speaking about ?
Your claim for a decline requires that NDS > 3DS > Switch lifetime. If cheaper versions of the Switch can't raise sales of the system significantly, then it becomes clear to me that Switch is fundamentally incapable of hitting the numbers that 3DS hit, and that would indeed suggest that portable hardware seems incapable of achieving the highs of its predecessors, yes. At least for the moment (since you never can rule out a future handheld system doing NDS-like astronomical numbers again, of course).
Now, what would I expect be the influence on hardware? To compare this, I will give you a comment on my expectations for Switch sales in the first half of 2020 compared to the first half of 2019 (which seems a fair comparison to make in my view). For the first half of 2019, we have the following sales:
Code:
|System | This Week | Last Week | Last Year | YTD | Last YTD | LTD |
| NSW | 59.184 | 29.058 | 50.678 | 1.483.898 | 1.167.557 | 8.373.444 |
A total of
1.483.898 units sold in the first half of 2019. This amounts to an average sales level of 57k per week. In my opinion, for the Switch Lite to be considered to be having a significant impact on the Switch sales, I expect sales to increase to an average of 90k-95k over this period (note that this is
average, not minimum sales level). This would result in a total sales amount for H1 2020 of 2.34M-2.47M approximately. As you will have noticed, I expect an over 50% increase in sales. This would, incidentally, put it very close to the numbers that 3DS did in H1 2012 (I swear I first came up with the number and then found the 3DS comparison):
Code:
|System | This Week | Last Week | Last Year | YTD | Last YTD | LTD |
| 3DS # | 65.267 | 66.953 | 31.545 | 2.284.815 | 1.185.436 | 6.420.554 |
Moreover, I expect this sales level to be more sustainable for Switch over a longer period of time due to better software support and the future potential to drop price even further to 15k yen. My expectation for the lifetime sales is therefore that Switch will outsell 3DS by a hair (so sell a bit over 25M lifetime).
So what about the period from the launch of the Switch Lite to the end of the year? For that, I think it's instructive to compare with Switch last year (when it had major software during the holidays) and to 3DS 2011 holidays. First, we look at the Switch 2018 holidays:
Week before aligned Switch Lite release:
Switch YTD = 1.739.981
End of year:
Switch YTD = 3.534.165
Total = 1,794,184
Now, we look at the 3DS holiday 2011 numbers:
Week before aligned Switch Lite release:
3DS YTD = 1.835.442
End of year:
3DS YTD = 4,282,142
Total = 2,446,700
My expectation for Switch this year, in the weeks from September 20th to the end of the year (15 weeks counted) is for Switch to sell somewhere around 2.6M. This period for Switch in 2018 was actually pretty good considering the price of the system, although it had two major hardware movers with Pokémon Let's Go and Smash Ultimate to help. This year, however, it has a true new generation Pokémon, which should rival the other two in terms of hardware selling capability. 3DS had Mario Kart 7, Super Mario 3D Land, and Monster Hunter ultimate in that period to move units, which is a very strong lineup as well. So, the software is roughly comparable in terms of hardware selling capability between the systems, so the comparison is as good as we can get it. I believe Switch will do slightly better than 3DS did in the same period, with maybe the hardware sales being skewed a bit more towards the first few weeks than 3DS had (that is, I expect a November-December comparison to potentially give a draw or a small win for 3DS, but the September and October weeks to be much in favour of Switch). In that September-October period I mentioned, 3DS did 376,202 units, and I expect Switch to do significantly more than that between September 20th (or that week) and the end of October.
These are my expectations for the next year or so.