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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - What will drive Switch's 20+ million year sales?

I think Smash will contribute, but I don't see many rushing out "I'm buying a Switch now that Smash is out!" - more like "Ah, here's Smash Brothers, that'll be a good game in my library" as it is more of a novelty title that a small bubble of people has decided is some kind of great competitive grail... similar to the Metroid bubble - both of whom consist almost entirely of existing Switch owners.

The real title that will muscle in the sales is Pokemon. Millions and millions of Pokemon fanatics are still without Switches. I also think people are taking the "Bah Indie games!!!!" thing far more lightly than they should. A gaming console/portable console that can play Indie games holds a much larger appeal than many are considering; I look at my kids and their friends, and that's what they want a Switch for.



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April is literally the first month of the Fiscal Year. Chill.



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Lonely_Dolphin said:
I can see the breakdown going something like this:

April - 1m
May - 1m
June - 1m
July - 1.5m (Octopath/Yokai)
August - 1m
September - 2m (Smash)
October - 1.5m
November - 3.5m (Pokemon)
December - 4m
January - 1.5m
February - 1.5m
March - 1.5m

Your projections for April are highly unlikely based off recent NPD data ... 

As for this topic, I think Nintendo maybe off by a couple to several million units for their expectations ... 



I don't think they will reach 20M (or shipped with a lot of stock left), and I guess they know that already. They expected Labo to be a success and to sell hardware until other big games arrive later in the year. Labo isn't doing what they expected, so unless something is a bigger success than expected later they won't make it.



Faelco said:

I don't think they will reach 20M (or shipped with a lot of stock left), and I guess they know that already. They expected Labo to be a success and to sell hardware until other big games arrive later in the year. Labo isn't doing what they expected, so unless something is a bigger success than expected later they won't make it.

Just to let you know

PS4 sold 175k in April 2016 NPD which was when Sony shipped 20 million for the fiscal year.

Switch sold 171k in April 2018 NPD and Nintendo's forcast is 20 million for the fiscal year.



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zorg1000 said:
Faelco said:

I don't think they will reach 20M (or shipped with a lot of stock left), and I guess they know that already. They expected Labo to be a success and to sell hardware until other big games arrive later in the year. Labo isn't doing what they expected, so unless something is a bigger success than expected later they won't make it.

Just to let you know

PS4 sold 175k in April 2016 NPD which was when Sony shipped 20 million for the fiscal year.

Switch sold 171k in April 2018 NPD and Nintendo's forcast is 20 million for the fiscal year.

Right, but wouldn't you say the Switch is much more reliant on North America than the PS4? If my math is accurate from the data on VGchartz, in 2017 Nintendo had 37.2% of Switches sold in the US whereas Sony had 26.3% of PS4s sold in the US.

Taking that data, if you take the same trends for April 2018 for the Switch and April 2016 for the PS4 there would be 460k Switches sold globally and 665k PS4s sold globally. That's a pretty big difference when the two individual NPD totals are so close.



Sony shipped 20 million in the Fiscal year from April 2016-March 2017.

Nintendo is forcasting 20 million in the fiscal year from April 2018-March 2019.

PS4 NPD April 2016-175k
PS4 Media Create April 2016-92k
US+Japan April 2016-267k

NSW NPD April 2018-171k
NSW Media Create April 2018-162k
US+Japan April 2018-333k

Europe/Rest of the World probably give PS4 a slight overall lead but nothing overwhelming. Just shows how silly it is to base fiscal year shipments off of the sales of a single month.



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melbye said:
Well, yeah. We already know Smash is coming , so is Pokemon. those two alone will drive sales. Nintendo wouldn't project 20 million sold if they didn't have the software

I don't know about that.  Nintendo is notoriously bad at predicting sales of their hardware.  



zorg1000 said:
Sony shipped 20 million in the Fiscal year from April 2016-March 2017.

Nintendo is forcasting 20 million in the fiscal year from April 2018-March 2019.

PS4 NPD April 2016-175k
PS4 Media Create April 2016-92k
US+Japan April 2016-267k

NSW NPD April 2018-171k
NSW Media Create April 2018-162k
US+Japan April 2018-333k

Europe/Rest of the World probably give PS4 a slight overall lead but nothing overwhelming. Just shows how silly it is to base fiscal year shipments off of the sales of a single month.

Right, that's why I went with global percentage since Japan would be an extremely skewed region. Europe is the highest selling region for the PS4 so to ignore it leads to misleading data such as your numbers above.



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