Good thing we have Smash now! Keeping the chart alive!

Those are the exact number of pre-orders.

Pokemon will flop and Smash Bros will explode. Instead of going with core fans demographics Masuda decided casual mobile GO player should be the main focus.

Smash will smash Nintendo expectation with 20 Million units LTD

You should read the OP, to ensure that you aren't disappointed next time.

It's a really tiny chain of stores, like a dozen or so, so it's not all of Japan. You have to compare final pre-order counts of similar games and compare them to the actual release numbers for the whole country to get an idea of what the ratio might be. So like if the store is more heavily Playstation than Nintendo, it will have a greater concentration of Playstation than the rest of the country so the Playstation ratio would be lower and the Nintendo one would be higher. There was a time when the ratio was about 1000:1 on average, but a few of the stores closed and it feels like lately the ratio is harder to figure out. You can still compare how a game does here to how a previous release did to get an idea of how it might do when it releases. So like Smash Ultimate is kicking both versions of Smash 4's asses, so it's looking really good for Ultimate.

It's not even Playstation vs Nintendo vs MS.

More like it depends on the system. Handhelds vs Home console especially.

Yeah, I'm inclined to agree, I was just giving a general example that a lot of people seem to give. The preorders do seem a bit Playstation centric, but I think it's more that Playstation people preorder games more. In addition to systems, it also depends on genre, from what I've seen. Niche games seem to worse ratios, or at least they used to I think. I can't figure it out anymore. But that's half the fun of this thread, trying to guess how it will play out. He needs to figure it out for himself. I just gave him a quick explainer in hopes that he'd give the thread a second chance.

I'd say it will end up in between, since it's a special entry not really comparable with previous games

Well for one thing, the weekly points for Octopath matched up very closely 1000:1 to its MC first week sales. So I think the weekly points indicator is far more important than the number of points a title has before it drops off the chart.

From my perspective it is less Switch vs PS4 and more casual vs otaku. Touhou for instance is an otaku franchise. Even though it is on Switch I expect it to sell less than 1:1000. Whereas Taiko is a casual rhythm game. I expect it to sell more than 1:1000. Games that do well on COMG but not on MC are otaku games such as bishoujo visual novels and dungeon crawlers such as Island and Mary Skelter. Otaku are much more prone to pre-order something.