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quickrick on 21 January 2018
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LipeJJ said:
Intrinsic said:

Ok..... so lets be honest here..

Are you saying taht the launch month of a console is no different from any other normal month? Because if you are gonna make the argument that one console has two months less on the market.... shouldn't you also mention that said console was launched and had its first holiday season within those 10 months?

On non "hot" months the NS averaged around 250K/month. It lost 2017 by 568k. Now even if we give it those two months at that 250k average it still loses. Butthen you have to consider something..... if this wasn't the launch year, would it have sold 900k in any normal month? My money is on no. But when it does sell up to 900k in a normal month (jan-oct) in NA over the next 4 years please feel free to call me out on that.

The launch is indeed important and is a lot bigger than a normal month, but that doesn't change the fact that the launch year is usually some of the worst years for a console (usually, not always). So in the end the launch month is kind of meaningless in the full year when sales plummet in the months afterwards and stay low due to the small library. That's what happens most of the time when a console launches. In the case of Switch it was even worse cause it had supply issues through the whole year. On top of that, we're comparing its launch year to PS4's peak (or very close to it). 

With 2 months more last year they would be virtually tied, because like you said Switch did 250k on average on non-hot months, so we should hipotetically add another 500k to that 4.9m figure, giving something around 5.4m. Isn't that impressive? ^^ 

You know what would be a fair comparison? March 2017 to March 2018. This way we'd have full data and the same timeframe for both. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

The main reason consoles in high demand like wii, ps2, and ps4 have bad first years is stock problems, they launch during the holidays with just stock enough stock to meet launch demand resulting in them not getting real holiday boosts, which is huge. reading your post above that companies will ship more because of the holidays is false, they usually just ship what they can, switch shipments were very similar to ps4 during the holidays 2.74 million for 27 days vs 4.2 for 45 days.