Not sure what you mean here, are you referring to next week, with the sales boost from Japan?

Yeah, honestly stock shortages are about the only thing I can see potentially stopping Switch from passing Xbone lifetime sales by 2020.

The Xbox1 is completely dead in terms of games / hardware / having a future, however releasing new hardware especially right now would do absolutely nothing, if anything it would just end up killing the Xbox as a brand rather than just letting the X1 die over the next 18 months until Scarlet arrives, MS right now have the most powerful console on the market by a factor of 1.5 over the PS4Pro as well as over 6x the power of the number 1 selling system in the world, pound for pound the X1 could sell 40k X1X's in a week and technically sell more power than a 200k week for the Switch if all the units sold were the premium variant of the system.

What I mean is, hardware is absolutely not the issue in the Xbox camp, the software is, there hasn't been a single reason why you have to own an Xbox1, with very few launch window exceptions every single game that is on the platform can be played elsewhere and better / cheaper, the systems "exclusives" all have an * hanging over them which state that they are all on Windows 10 / Steam as well as the system, or in the case of a few titles you can now even get them on the Switch, when it comes to the base 1.79TF machine any of those titles can be ran on a PC you could put together from second hand parts for a few hundred euro and they'll do a better job than the 640p Titanfall that the base X1 drops to at times.

What MS needs to do with the Xbox division is what Nintendo did with the WiiU, ignore the X1, it's done, they need to look to the Scarlet but not just from a hardware point of view, but set up a launch date for the system and then make absolutely sure that each 3-6 month period has a massive AAA first party game on the system (and only on the system, even if for that 6 month window) for at least the first 2 years, Nintendo let the WiiU wallow away selling 20k per week for the better part of a year before the launch of the Switch, but think about it... what is the Switch from a hardware point of view? It's a barely modified Nvidia shield from about 3-4 years before the Switch launch, they had to design the controllers and the OS but the hardware wasn't the reason for the long dev time of that machine, they took the hardware directly from Nvidia and stuck a Nintendo logo and Zelda breath of the wild on it, 6 months after that they stuck Splatoon on there, 3 months later Mario Ody dropped... Software is what will Sell Scarlet, not a 10TF machine, not a 20TF machine, heck you could jump up and down all day on stage at E3 showing off high res movies of the motherboard of the neXtbox and talking about the Ram frequencies of it, Nintendo come out and drop a 30 second teaser of Ganon down a hole, which one gets gamers buying consoles?

....

Sorry for the long post, I'm in the middle of writing a project for work lol, word count is important to me!

A "before" was missing.

Should be "last week before Switch opens a major advantage over PS4 on the weekly chart"

Ah, gotcha. I will say, as much as I wanna see Switch soar, it was exciting for a bit having it be a close competition for first place again. Still, I can't wait now to see what happens when the Lite comes out, and if titles like DQ11 and Luigi's Mansion 3 turn out to be big system sellers.

Well at least we had a good fight for about 2-3 years. Let's see next gen if we will see a good battle.

Yeah next gen will be interesting, it is possible things could be close between the PS5 in its first year or two and the Switch in its prime.

I hope Xbox don't flunk out as badly next gen too, 2013-2016 was less interesting in that there was no real competition, the big three almost always landed in the same first-second-third order every week for years on end. Granted, I doubt Scarlet has any real chance of beating PS5 but it'd be cool if it at least gave it some decent competition next gen.

It would be cool if at least in USA Scarlet have a close fight and in Japan Switch keeps momentum, so even if PS5 (after Switch prime) keeps wining the weekly we may have discussions on the regional areas where the competitors were able to hold out.

Yeah, I think discussion and activity on VGC would suffer a lot if the competition ever becomes too one-sided or if there's no actual fight. There just wouldn't be much to talk about in the sales threads.