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Yakuzaice on 15 January 2013
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the_dengle said:
pezus said:

Actually, like I said earlier in the thread, WiiU is now down to exactly Vita level if we compare the similar weeks. Difference is that that week was in May for Vita and Jan for WiiU, when sales are higher in general than in May.

Edit: Looks like you were already told. Well, repeating doesn't hurt!

I disagree, I think at the beginning of a generation the post-Holiday sales slump is more dramatic, and I present figures comparing sales in the second week of January to the month of May from 2007 and 2008 to back up this theory.

2007:

Jan 13 total hardware sales -- 884k

total hardware for each week in May -- 1.27m, 1.10m, 999k, 989k

2008:

Jan 12 total hardware sales -- 1.11m
total hardware for each week in May -- 1.70m, 1.26m, 1.08m, 1.33m, 1.17m

Only once in those two years did a single week in May fall below sales the second week of January the same year.

Both of those years had pretty specific reasons why May was higher than the second week of the year.

For 2007, the DS was supply constrained for a brief time after the holidays.  It was pulling 400-500k weeks by February.  If you remove the DS from the equation...

Jan 13: 645,760
May: 692k, 628k, 580k, 568k

For 2008, May had GTA IV for the HD consoles, and Mario Kart/Wii Fit/more supply for the Wii.  I mean the Wii was usually jumping between 2-400k, then for the first week of May it jumps to 645k, then again for Wii Fit it jumps to 560k

2009

Jan 10: 1.49 million
Jan 17: 1.19 million
May: 1 mill, 960k, 838k, 871k, 918k

2010
Jan 9: 1.94 million
Jan 16: 1.22 million
May: 894k, 825k, 811k, 821k

2011 (and this has an extra platform for the May numbers, 3DS)
Jan 8: 1.8 million
Jan 15: 1.06 million
May: 841k, 706k, 777k, 854k

2012
Jan 14: 961k
Jan 21: 847k
May: 599k, 492k, 512k, 564k

I went ahead and added the third week as well since the numbers became a bit skewed in 2010 and 2011 with the second week being so close to New Years.  It didn't actually change any results though.  The second (and third) week of January has been bigger than each  week in May for the past 3 years.

As for it being a trend for new hardware/new generations.

DS
Jan 8 2005: 171k (no PAL for Jan)
May: 116k, 82k, 80k, 106k

360
Jan 14 2006: 147k
May: 104k, 98k, 93k, 90k

PS3
Jan 13 2007: 89k (no PAL sales for Jan)
May: 81k, 71k, 65k, 65k, 64k

Wii
Jan 13 2007: 251k
May: 291k, 244k, 229k, 240k, 248k

3DS
Jan 14 2012: 239k
May: 170k, 118k, 117k, 129k

Looking at those, only the Wii conforms to your theory.  That is mostly due to the fact that it was selling what they shipped, and that figure was fairly consistent in 2007.