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xMetroid on 01 February 2018
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Shadow1980 said:
xMetroid said:

Companies are launching with holidays in mind during fall launches. Its not like Switch didn't get its stock problems. It just got it during the entire year instead of christmas which still had some btw.

 

Also, PS4 fell under 10k in japan pretty quickly, it wouldn't make much difference. Switch still has market to be launched into and got some success in SK and taiwan only in December. 

Well, we are talking "fastest selling of all time," and I'm saying that the Switch is hard to make accurate comparisons for. Such comparisons use to be simple back when we were dealing strictly with systems that launched in Q4. But comparing a March launch like the Switch with systems that launched in the fall makes things messy. If we do a straight-up launch-aligned comparison, we get this:

We clearly see why the comparison is not accurate. It ends up comparing the Switch's Nov.+Dec. period to the July-Aug. period for November-launch consoles like the PS4 & Wii (and shift that a month earlier for the PS2, which launched in an October). It makes about as much sense to use this to claim "fastest-selling system" as it did for people to argue against the Switch for having a "bad" second month when its second month wasn't a holiday month.

And this is just for a single region. When you combine everything together into global sales, things get even messier when you take into account that simultaneous global launches in all three major regions (N. America, Europe, and Japan) are a rarity.

A better comparison would be to do this instead:

That way we get a straight quarter-vs.-quarter, month-vs.-month comparison for a single region. This does mean that we can't really do a "fastest-selling system" horse race comparison, but you know what? I'm fine with that. Such a comparison is largely meaningless in this sort of situation. But it does mean we can do comparisons like this:


So, while the Switch's status as "fastest-selling system ever" is rather dubious, and will have disappeared in very short order, it's also still incredibly clear that the Switch is doing very, very well, and is off to a great start. In fact, it'd be doing even better if there were no shortages. The system is and will continue to be a huge success for Nintendo.

We literally never used this argument before the Switch success. Before the Switch launch everyone was worried and asking why Nintendo wasn't launching the Switch in Fall instead of March.

 

Also, just seeing that the 2 consoles holding the records were launched during fall, it doesn't feel like it's a big difference.