For my fellow Nintencucks, if anyone was wondering, apparently the physical "Key Card" version of Bravely Default HD Remaster was literally the only launch title offered in "Key Card" or cartridge format that was
NOT for preorder. You can actually "pre-order" the digital version (why anyone would pre-order a digital version, especially when you get nothing extra is completely beyond me) in a few places, but no one is offering a pre-order for the physical key card version. Why this is, I have absolutely no idea.
Interestingly, I was told that physical Gamestop locations are offering pre-orders for the digital versions of Bravely Default HD Remaster, which sorta bends reality a little bit for me. You go to a physical location, to buy a per-order for a purely digital products... Why that is even offered, and why anyone would do it is absolutely beyond my ability to understand it. There isn't a scenario I can think of where this doesn't actually lead to more effort or hassle than absolutely any other method of purchasing this digital product.
Here's a better way to look at it. Here are their sales for each of their full fiscal years (ignoring the sales for March 17 basically)
>18 - 15M
>19 - 16.9M
>20 - 21M
>21 - 28.8M
>22 - 23M
>23 - 17.9M
24 - 15.7M
Take out those three years, and the average sales is only 16.3M a quarter which would be 114M. So my 50M number may be too high but it's not too far off the mark. Point is COVID absolutely changed the trajectory of this system. This is also why anyone predicting 20M sales for the Switch 2 this year are insane (seen one analyst float that number). Outside of COVID, it never broke 20 million. There is also the fact this system has been on the market for 7 years (DS sold more in only 6 years) and a lot of sales in the last two full years were the OLED model, so there is probably a lot of people who have just been upgrading (probably the same for the PS5 too). People just look at the headline number and make assumptions based on that, especially the video game industry analyst.
Given the rate before and after COVID, the excess during COVID, at most, is approximately 23.675 million, averaging out to 7.892 million excess units sold per year of peak COVID. It is likely even less than that because we can only guess what the average sold would have been during that time period to derive estimated excess units sold using the data before and after, which has its own flaws. So, at best, one can say that approximately 23.675 million excess units were sold, with it being likely that the number is even less than that. Statistics doesn't allow for any additional level of certainty in the numbers than that. All told, the excess number sold due to COVID, at best, represent 15.7% of lifetime sales, which is a fairly small percentage.
So it can be said that if COVID didn't happen it is likely that the Nintendo Switch would have sold approximately 127.19 million units at worst, which is still an absolutely huge number given that the 3DS only sold 75.94 million units during its lifespan, and the WiiU only sold 13.56 million units during its lifespan. That would still put it far in front of the Wii, which was widely considered a hit, at 101.63 million units, but behind the Nintendo DS that sold 154.02 million units during tis lifespan, which was Nintendo's best selling system, hands down. Even the original Gameboy and Gameboy Color combined only sold 118.69 million during its lifespan, which was much longer than the Switch. With the Gameboy Advance only selling 81.51 million units during it's lifetime, even if we discount the excess COVID sales, that makes the Switch the second best selling of any system sold by Nintendo, either portable or console, in its history.
Total number of units sold, world wide, taken from here:
