RolStoppable said:
Barkley said:
Your most important point at the bottom is fine. Nintendo has sold plenty of units of hardware and in terms of simply total gaming hardware sold, Sony is leading but couldn't be described as dominant. In terms of number of unique customers however that may be a different story.
The issue is when the data of 9 systems combined vs 5 systems combined, without averaging, is used as a means to determine or predict Switch's sales potential or markets fanbase size. You say it's a useless metric, yet a purpose of this thread seems to be to use the data to make some kind of assumption about the Switch, as seen by the need to accommodate it here. "But since Switch is the successor to both Nintendo's home console and handheld console lines, it is mandatory for handhelds to be included. Otherwise it would be impossible to make any sort of competent and credible analysis of the European market."
The figure (186.5m & 169.93m) cannot be used to determine the number of people who are PlayStation users vs Nintendo Users in Europe. As a devout Nintendo fan would have purchased 9+ systems, as opposed to a PlayStation fan purchasing 5+ systems, simply due to the number of systems available.
So any conclusions on total hardware sold, yeah that's perfectly fine. Directly comparing those numbers (186.5m & 169.93m) to determine the size of the fanbase in that region or the sales potential of a singular system, not fine.
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If that's your issue, then you shouldn't use an average to determine the ceiling for Switch, but rather pick the highest selling console from the list.
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Well yeah, for a system's potential ceiling that would be the way to go.
But really I'm also saying there's more than one way to look at what success and "dominance"is. There's metrics other than Total Hardware sold, such as Number of regular unique customers, Average system sales, etc.
From a company's point of view, higher average product sales is better, after all they'd rather have a single system sell 40m units, than 2 different systems sell 20m each.
A win (or being close) simply by releasing more products for your fans to purchase than the competition doesn't allow a lot of conclusions to be drawn.
