PS4 VS Switch lifetime sales, which console will sell the most?

[DonFerrari]

Miyamotoo said:

DonFerrari said:

Yes I'll deny any possibility of a company throwing away money for no good reason. For they to have 4M available at launch they would have to postpone launch for some months and incur in unecessary cost. And again as Intrisic have put no company have done this, but for some reason Nintendo that couldn't produce enough to meet demand because of part constraint would do it just to win your argument.

I gave you good and logical possibilities why that maybe would make sense, and why thats not throwing away money, you ignoried all that and you were acting like evrething was set in stone, lol. Again, you dont know that, if plan from start would be holiday season launch and around 4m prepared consoles from launch. Again, Nintendo never didnt said they couldn't produce more than 2m for Switch launch, just that initial plan was to prepare 2m for launch and that they later had problem to increase that number, but if initial plan was to have bigger number stock for launch they could probably prepare more. Stock problem after launch is different thing, because maybe they had plan  to produce around 500k per month and they needed much more than that beacuse console was selling better than 500k and and factories couldn't start producing much more than that so soon.

Nope man, the fact that I don't consider they valid doesn't mean I ignored, it means it isn't enough reason to justify the cost. If they are doing a full year run to sell 25M, there is very little reason to not be able to adjust production to end up overproducing 5M and shipping that on the next quarter. Because first they would be producing their regular amount, second there would be the already shipped amount, third the FYQ1 would be a slower month so that 5M would be sitting on Nintendo shelves for over 1 quarter just to use your supposed bargain.

They never said they couldn't produce more than 2m... but after launch they showed they couldn't by not being able to have steady production at all to meet your supposed production level.

If you produce 500k/month you would need to stock for 8 months (instead of 4 months) prior to launch, go again and do the maths on the cost of having all that sitting on shelves (8 months at an average 2M consoles stored at 299 USD value... that is 600M dollars on 8 months, that would have a financial cost of some dozen million).

Mnementh said:

DonFerrari said:

Yes. And is that valid for products that even after reading demand they fail to meet for 2 years?

Dunno what was the case with Wii. Nintendo was probably overly conservative and didn't wanted any stock staying in storerooms. Well, they had plenty of units in storage with the WiiU.

But the Wii is the outlier here. Which other console had supply constraints over an extended period of time globally? Look, the Switch goes well, but is by now long available in most parts of the world. Dunno if Japan is still supply constrained, but maybe they still can't access supply correctly there or demand is increasing in the time they ramp up production and so invalidating the earlier research. But in the US or europe Nintendo meets demand. Same for PS4, it was not for long supply constrained.

Well, I can understand being conservative even with preorders on launch, but shortages for 2 years straight can't be only being conservative.

For Switch it took 8 months(?) to get to attend demand and for PS4 about 4 months. So we can't really be confident of how much the impact of a different launch window would be.