| Shadow1980 said: Some definite positives for the Wii U. The price cut is working, with an over three-fold increase in weekly U.S. sales from summer lows and September being the best month for the system here since March, despite the price cut being in effect for only the last 11 days of the month. However, sales are still depressed by a lack of software, not to mention the "GTA effect" is still in, uh, effect, thus causing 360 & PS3 sales to be higher than their average numbers throughout the summer prior to GTAV. Still, this is the best N. American sales numbers so far for Nintendo's current fiscal year, besting even the jumps resulting from Pikmin 3 and Rayman Legends:
I was thinking it would do a lot better than 30k, but upon looking at how other systems trended after having major price cuts of their own and reviewing my math, my initial calculation was more than a bit crude. In the week prior to the price cut, the Wii U had sold 8612 units, or about 1230 per day on average. The week the price cut went into effect, sales jumped to 19,617, a 2.28x increase for only two days of the price cut being in effect. Assuming five days at 1230 per day, that's 6150, leaving 13,467 for the first two days of the price cut, or 6734 per day. My mistake was using per-day averages; the price cut came into effect on a Friday, and I neglected to take into account that people are more likely to buy on Friday-Sunday. I had assumed those weekend sales as being the average for the whole week, which would result in a total of over 47,000; when factoring in typical weekly sales in other regions, that would have resulted in 60k globally for the week. So, I admit to my bad projections based off a flawed methodology. Had I applied the same reasoning to the 360 back when the "S" model came out (which was essentially a price cut as it made the top-line SKU $300, replacing the $400 Elite), I would have estimated some figures that were way too high to what they actually were. The week prior to this price cut, it sold 41,751 units, an average of about 5964 per day. The week the cut went into effect, sales jumped to 102,944 units. The 360 S came out on June 19, 2010, a Saturday, and the sales week ends Saturday in VGC's charts. Had I assumed a 5964 average for six days, or 35,784 total, that would have left over 67,000 units just for Saturday. But assuming 67k per day for a whole week would end up with some 470,000 for the whole week. The actual number according the VGC? 141,294. So yeah. Definitely some bad methodology on my part. Variation in day-to-day sales not being present on the chart, I didn't think to take them into consideration. Out of sight, out of mind. :/ Nevertheless, the price cut has worked, and Nintendo would be wise to implement it in other regions, which would likely replicate the same effect. In addition, there's still the holidays and several new titles therein. WWHD should prove to be a solid seller in America (it's sitting at #26 on Amazon's Top 100 list in the video games department, and is the 15th highest-ranked software title ther right now, so that's a good sign), and there's also Wii Party U, Sonic: Lost World, and Super Mario 3D World coming out over the next few weeks, with DKC and Mario Kart 8 coming out early next year. We know sales increase during the holiday, and that they also increase as a response to both price cuts and to major software titles debuting, as seen not only in the above chart as well as the following charts:
We always see a common pattern, not just in the years shown but in every year. Sales rise steadily during the first three weeks of November and then spike the week of Black Friday, then dip the following week before growing again until the last week until Christmas, then there's a big post-Christmas drop-off. However, sales for the first three or four months of the year are still higher on average than in the mid-year months. We also see in the gaps between a price cut and the start of the holiday shopping season that average weekly sales are substantially higher than median summer sales prior to the price cut. There's still the question of how well the Wii U will do during the holidays, and how much the combination of reduced price (currently only a factor in N. America) and an influx of new titles will improve its prospects in the coming months. We don't know how much the price cut would have improved sales had GTA not been a factor. We also don't know how much the lack of major software titles has been depressing Wii U sales throughout 2013. As for the effects of the launches of the PS4 and XBO, considering their predecessors both sold only about 1.2 million units worldwide in their debut holiday seasons (early adopters are not that common) and that all of their third-party launch window titles are cross-gen (which could depress sales), not to mention the PS4 isn't coming out until February in Japan, they may not cannibalize too much of potential Wii U sales for November and December. Also, in December 2006, the 360 sold more than the PS3 and Wii did combined in the U.S., so if the Wii U were to get a good enough holiday bounce, the idea that it could best either of the other two eighth-gen systems, at least in America, isn't too far-fetched. I think that if everything goes right, the Wii U should still fare rather decently, at least in the short term. It's highly possible that it could sell at least some 3 million units this quarter, with 1,500,000 in the U.S. alone. After all, no system from a major brand, at least none in the past two generations, has to my knowledge done worse in its second holiday season than in its first. I think it's still too early to count the Wii U out. Of course, this is all guess work and there are many factors at work here, and none of us know for sure what will happen, but I'm optimistic that the Wii U can be salvaged and can go on to achieve decent sales figures (~40M minimum lifetime, about the same as the SNES). The conditions that led to the N64 and GameCube's relatively low sales numbers don't exist this time around, but rather its main problem has been the games situation, which will be a total non-issue by the end of Nintendo's current fiscal year. |
....I am speechless you should be a video game anyalst...you'll be far better than patcher anyway.
