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SuperNova on 02 November 2017
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Shadow1980 said:
RolStoppable said:

My response was towards Lawlight's downplaying that Switch has everything going for it while the 3DS pulled off huge numbers with virtually nothing going for it.

Now regarding your Switch sales analysis in this most recent post, it's outright terrible. Switch has been supply-constrained for the entire time it has been out, so each and every week was capped by the supply that Nintendo pushed into the market.

Your conclusion of A and B is also wrong because even the ill-fated Wii U managed to double its baseline after the release of Splatoon in mid-2015.

I actually meant to reply to Lawlight. He was overstating the supposed negative impact of the 3DS's lack of major games. Software wasn't the 3DS's problem. The price was. The 3DS was by far the most expensive Nintendo handheld ever in Japan going by launch prices, and the second most expensive overall after the Vita. That price cut was essential to getting the 3DS up to a strong baseline relative to previous Nintendo handhelds.

Regarding the Switch, it may have been supply-constrained, but it did get boosts from several notable games. The duration of the boosts is consistent to what we've seen with every other system: it lasts for a week, maybe two, before sales dip back to baseline.

Finally, as for the Wii U, Splatoon may have been responsible for the improved baseline, given how baseline sales were in 2015 prior to Splatoon's launch and how Splatoon remained in the MC Top 10 for the entire remainder of 2015. Aside from maybe FFVII's U.S. launch, that's probably the only time a single game boosted baseline sales all by itself, and probably through generating greater interest in the system rather than purely by having new hardware units sold alongside it.

The point is that the Switch, with notable game releases didn't 'get' boosts from hightened consumer interest, but instead was 'given' boosts by nintendo through bigger shipments.

You can only correlate 'game boosts' with consumer interest if there is ample supply, but in the Switches case it has been selling out every single week in japan. Therefore even if the game boost would have been longer and more pronounced you'd have no way of knowing, because the console can't sell more than nintendo ships. The switch boosts are in a way 'artificially' created by the amount nintendo shipped in every given week, not 'genuinely' by the hightened consumer demand a game release usually brings (since demand outstripped supply anyways).

So whatever boosts the Switch did get doen't really allow conclusions to be drawn about the average lengh and effect of typical 'game boosts' and are therefore not a good datapoint for reference.