| RolStoppable said: You make a bunch of bad assumptions. Firstly, the DS only got to ~3.8m in its first year, so that's the bar to beat. Secondly, Nintendo's forecast of 10m is the minimum, not the ceiling. Thirdly, since Japan received shipments of about 0.75m by the end of March 2017, that makes roughly 3m to go; your 2.5m for Europe and the required 3m for Japan still leave 4.5m of the minimum shipment for America and such a breakdown is quite realistic. Fourthly, demand still far outstrips supply in Japan at the current point in time, so the system can get by with SMO being a game that is going to sell between 1-1.5m copies in Japan. Beating the DS's first year (or the Wii's which is only marginally better) isn't as much of a stretch as you think. |
It seems like bad data is culprit on my end ... (And Nintendo's forecast is just that, I don't see it to be anything more or less in it but if anything I'm giving Nintendo the benefit of the doubt that they'll be able to produce enough units and reach their target by the end of the holiday rather than their inital fiscal year ended 2018 expectation.)
And as of June 3rd according to this sites data the Switch has sold 0.93M units already. With roughly 30 weeks remaining the Switch would have to start averaging a little above 95K per week to be able reach 3.8M units ... (The Switch would have to sell at least an average rate of 40% higher than it already did in the past 14 weeks which included the launch itself so that averaged out to little over 66K per week and not only that but the Switch would have to maintain these rates for twice as long as since the system has been on the shelf!)
All of this depends on that I only assume Europe's share will double for the rest of the year but there's another elephant in the room which is also the rest of the world which currently makes up a significant portion of the Switch sales already (440K according to this site) but let's just also assume that the region won't be able to grow much further for this year and peg it at 500K ...
That leaves 7M Switch units to play around with between the US and Japan in a year where Mario is releasing with a relatively strong dollar (Switch costs ~270 USDs in Japan) so Nintendo would have to willingly allocate more stock in Japan to the detriment of their profit margins ...
In short there's way too many moving parts such as production, regional stock allocation, software and how these shares of hardware sales will develop in each regions to reliably assume that the Switch will outsell the the DS or WII's first year in Japan ...
