May NPD 2019

[Bofferbrauer2]

Shadow1980 said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Wow at those upcoming Wii December sales! But the rest of the year was already foreshadowing what to come: The baseline dropped a lot compared to the previous years, and it looks like Switch has a shot at surpassing the Wii in July and August, and most probably will surpass it in November.

And I would never have guessed that the N64 would have won the first holiday season against Switch and Wii...

Yeah, the Wii was down quite a bit for most of 2009. While it was up a good bit for January and February, it was down every month from March to November. For the whole March-Nov. period, it was down 40.5%. Even if you include January & February, it was still down 27.9% for the year by the end of November. Then December comes along with a huge YoY increase that causes 2009 to almost close the gap with 2008, with the year as a whole being down only 5.7%. But in 2010 the Wii started to decline very quickly. The Switch will probably never sell what the Wii did because of how well the Wii sold in the 2007-2009 period, but the Switch could have overall better legs.

curl-6 said:

Yeah most people don't realize just how insanely strong the N64 started out; the problem was it crashed and burned once the droughts kicked in, with most third party support having jumped ship, leaving it with an almost Wii U-esque level of software output.

Actually, the N64 had a rather modest decline of only 7.8% in 1998, though that decline did accelerate over time, with 1999 being down 14.5%, 2000 being down 28.5%, and 2001 (the GC's release year) being down a massive 54%, with the system having completely flat-lined in 2002. Also, the N64 was getting steady support from Nintendo & Rare and several third parties through 2000. The N64's problem was that the PS1 started to leave it in the dust, and that was because the PS1 utterly outclassed it in terms of third-party support, and that was a time when third-party games were predominantly exclusive to one system (multiplatform didn't start to become the norm until the following generation). Sure, the N64 had support from Acclaim, Activision, EA, Midway, LucasArts, and THQ, very few of those were titles with massive mainstream appeal, with wrestling games and Turok being about the only ones to perform well on the system. Meanwhile, the PS1 had Final Fantasy, Tekken, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Crash, Spyro, Driver, and a bunch of other games that never made it to the N64 (well, RE2 did get a belated N64 port...). Final Fantasy VII in particular was what propelled the PS1 to new heights. While the PS1 did see steady improvement from its initially dismal sales thanks in large part to being reduced to $200 in May 1996 and then to $150 in March 1997, it wasn't until FFVII was released in Sept. 1997 that its sales really took off.

The N64 did start off strong, running off of the strength of the Nintendo brand in America. It sold almost as much in the entirety of 1996 as the PS1 did despite only being available for the last 14 weeks of the year. In 1997, it sold nearly 4.5 million units, which still ranks among the best first full years of a system ever (only slightly behind the Switch's 2017 and the PS4's 2014). But the PS1, despite struggling out of the gate, had a lot more going for it in the long run, and once it had that big super-hyped killer app in the form of FFVII, it was all over for the N64.

I wouldn't count the Switch out just yet, though it will probably need a pricecut or revision to do so. But it keeps up more or less with the Wii 2009 despite a game drought, so I expect the second half of the year be very competitive. And then of course, with Pokemon this November will easily surpass the one of the Wii in 2009. However, to keep up with the Wii in 2009 it needs more than just Pokemon, it needs a pricecut and/or revision of the Switch.

The N64's other problem was probably that it was really a success only in the US, with the rest of the world rather choosing Saturn or PlayStation. That situation certainly didn't help with publishers, and the N64 already had less due to having been forced to keep the cartridges (since the deals with Philips and Sony fell trough and didn't have enough time for a third try), so less incentive to port games to the N64.

And poor Saturn in the US...