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trent44 on 10 March 2018
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StarDoor said:
Kristof81 said:

Any calendar alignments in my figures start from the beginning of first full fiscal year, aka 1st of April (I should've added some asterix to the chart), or the closest date to it, as we're dealing with weekly figures. So it cancels all launch figures up to nearest April, which in case of Switch and 3DS would be 1 month worth of sales and in case of, let's say, PS4 four-ish months. As it's calendar alignment, all of those systems have had equal amount of holiday season sales accounted for. The calculation method is simply the sum of software sales from their first April to the date shown in the attached table. 

Yes, I know that. It does not counter anything I said.

Let's imagine that Switch had the exact same hardware sales as PS4, calendar aligned as of week 40.

This would mean PS4 and Switch both sold 12 million units between April and the first week of January. With identical hardware sales, you would think that software sales would be comparable too, right?

No.

Thanks to the differences in launch timing, PS4 sold 7 million units prior to the beginning of its first complete fiscal year, while Switch only sold 2.3 million. At the end of this period that you're comparing, this would put PS4's lifetime sales at 19.0 million, while Switch would be at 14.3 million.

In this scenario, PS4 will always have an enormous advantage, regardless of the current time of year, because 19.0 million console owners will obviously be buying more software than 14.3 million console owners. Switch could have the exact same hardware sales as PS4 for its entire life and it would still be behind in software thanks to the extra 4.7 million units PS4 would have because of its earlier launch. That's why a calendar-aligned comparison for software is nonsense.

I too would like to know what utility people use calendar-aligned comparisons for.

Launched-aligned helps with predicting lifetime sales curves and illustrates short term optics that developers use to approve their future projects for the platform (some developers probably even use data for attach rate of the game's genre or series if they have previous entries on the platform).