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Soundwave on 28 March 2017
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RolStoppable said:
Soundwave said:

Wii didn't have a big first month shipment in the US so using that as a first month barometer for anything is no big deal. 476k NPD for Wii versus 425k NPD for Wii U. The GameCube sold over 600k its first November beating both. 

I'm saying you can't literally take Famitsu/MC as absolute sell through, they don't literally count every copy sold, you have to assume if you're talking shipped versus sold it's fair to say you should assume there is going to be some discrepancy between tracked numbers and actual sell through. That's just a fact. 

Switch will do better than the Wii U for a variety of reasons and should do better than the 3DS early on because mainly Nintendo wasn't dumb enough to bank on the casual audience to carry their launch. If Switch's launch title was Nintendogs + Cats instead of Zelda: BotW I don't care what the hardware is, it would be collecting dust on storeshelves right now. 

And it is a soft launch mainly designed to finish this fiscal year with some positive news for investors. Selling the first 2 million units is easy, and it makes for a good story to shareholders especially in the light of Nintendo getting locked out of a big majority of Pokemon Go profits (dumb move to give Niantic the publishing rights). 

It looks very probable that Switch is going to beat the Wii U's launch with ease, because Switch is selling out. Wii U was readily available after its first weekend. That's the point of this thread: Not all systems sell out during their launch month.

How big of an error margin are you implying for NPD and the Japanese trackers? 1%? 2%? That's negligible, and anything above 5% would be idiotic. So why bring it up at all?

Switch was supposed to launch during the holiday season 2016. It probably only makes sense in your world that Nintendo would try to appease investors for the fiscal year ending March 2017 by delaying their latest hardware by three months.

Virtually anything could beat the Wii U's launch, it was a terribly handled launch that again tried to cash in on casuals and failed miserably when people got sick of 2D Mario and Nintendo's other big hope -- the mini-game collection Nintendo Land failed to be a hit. The Wii U did still sell 2.17 million give or take in about a month. So if the shipment for Wii U during that time was only 2 million flat, there would have been a full sell out and even shortages in places. 

The margin of error could be 5% sure, we don't know absoultely, I'm just saying if you're making an absolute statement like X number was sitting unsold on storeshelves, it's hard to know that for sure if you want to use it as an absolute to calculate things like percentages from. There are often 5+% variances just between trackers (Media Create, Famitsu, etc.)

I've said for two years now Nintendo was trying to launch the NX for holiday 2016. Obviously they failed to do so, like the person who is always late. The next "deadline" for them was March year end, they did get to that one, the reason why March is important is because if they miss March too they miss the fiscal year entirely and miss a valuable oppurtunity to deliver some PR spin to investors.