VGC 4th July Hardware/Software

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Wagram said:
Batman, Witcher, and Splatoon are beasting. Never been more happy to be wrong in Splatoon's case.

PS4 sales are insane. Honestly, I see Xbox possibly making up the NA sales difference in the holiday weeks, but EU and Japan will keep PS4 in the lead.

Splatoon is a bit of a mixed blessing though. Yes, for it's own sake it is doing very well and is looking like a brilliant new franchise for Nintendo. But it's has done virtually nothing for Wii U. Sure early July 2014 was still coming down from the MK8 launch, but YoY Wii U is down 20K(!!). And what's fascinating about that is MK8 and Splatoon are both at week 6 in this week of 2014/2015 and they have almost identical sales (MK8 105K, Splat 101K). Yet WiiU in 2014 was 50% higher than Wii U in 2015.

Splatoon is good for Splatoon, but that's about as far as it goes. Perhaps 'Splatoon: The INKredibles' (my title) for NX will be a system seller to people who never bought Wii U. But for now Splatoon seems to be mostly selling to the Nintendo core.

Very weird about lack of 360 numbers. Maybe ioi is having a hard time getting 360 data from some key markets, and with incomplete data from some of the larger markets it's best to probably leave it blank. I wonder if this is the reason for the latest set of delays in posting sales information. Would be nice to see an official word on it.

Damn! how much more dead can Xb one get outside of UK and NA? 75% of sales for this week come from just those two markets. Sure, they are the two most important markets for Xbox, but it's a terrible imbalance if a brand wants to be seen as globally relevant. If a game appeals more to markets outside of UK/USA then a publisher may wonder if putting the game on Xb one is worth the effort. MS needs to try to be positive about Xb one, but in reality they must be concerned about the serious narrowing of their market base.