October 2017 NPD Thread! Switch #1

[zorg1000]

Shadow1980 said:

DonFerrari said:

Shadow, let's not mix what you or others think is impressive...

If people are expecting over 400k sales (and before any leak of the over 2.6 or 2.7M sales, no one would know the brackets limits) and it sell sub 300k the word IMPRESSIVE doesn't describe it, and the other side of impressive is UNIMPRESSIVE. And even using your line of thought of 275-375k when it goes to the lower side of the spectrum then it would still be on the unimpressive side not the impressive.

If own your own line of thought considering the weekly sales of the previous month, and what bump MARIO (yes one of the biggest games they could release) should give to weekly sales, if 290k is what you expected, if it hits that then it also isn't impressive. Because you were expecting it.

Let's not forget what actually means to be impressed, surprised. Or something to be INcredible, fantastic, etc.... all those are words that describe things that go so far out of what was expected that it doesn't even seem real at first.

And "unimpressive" gives a negative connotation, as if the sales were lackluster or average at best or otherwise worthy of little more than a "meh" reaction, and "meh" is not the reaction one should have for these level of sales. By any objective standard, 290-300k for a 4-week non-holiday month is very good, exceptional even. Excepting Februaries and Marches (because tax season boost), the PS4 has so far only exceeded a 70k/week average for a non-holiday month four times: Sept. & Oct. 2014 (Destiny effect), June 2015 (Arkham Knight bundle), and June 2017 ($249 gold PS4).

It's not my fault people were grossly overestimating the Switch's sales potential for October. Yes, I did fail to realize that most of the predictions were made before the news of 2.6M LTD broke (I didn't bother checking dates in my prior post, so total mea culpa there), but a lot were made after that fact, so not everyone has that excuse. In any case, let's see what a 400+k prediction implies. Given what it sold in September (about 63k/week avg.), we can assume that at best the Switch sold around 190k for the first three weeks of October. That means to have sold over 400k, it needed to sell at least 210k in SMO week. That's a lot for a single week. Hell, that'd be an okay month by itself.  500+k would require over 310k. If we assume VGC isn't too far off the mark in its weekly hardware sales (±10% MoE at most), that would make SMO the single-biggest system-seller of the past decade, with the possible exception of Mario Kart Wii. In Japan the Switch only managed 126.7k that week, and the Switch's sales haven't been massively different than what they are in the U.S. It ought to have sold a good bit over 100k SMO week in the U.S., which is a not-bad-but-not-great week for a week with a major game, but we shouldn't expect a massively huge boost from a Super Mario game.

Given what we know of Super Mario's system-selling capabilities, or rather lack thereof, the idea that it could have generated one of the best non-holiday weeks ever, if not potentially the best in years, is patently ridiculous. If people have unrealistic expectations for how well something will sell, we shouldn't consider that if sales fail to meet those expectations that they are "unimpressive" or otherwise imply that they're not good. It's a strike against the predictors, not the Switch. I honestly considered 330k to be a very optimistic prediction. 400k? Unrealistic. 500k? Ridiculous. 600k? Had to be a joke.

This post really helps put it into perspective, PS4 only surpassed these sales in 3 non-holiday months.