| Hiku said: To be fair, if anyone said something like "Switch will win every NPD in 2018", they may very well have changed their outlook after seeing the first few NPD's of this year. (Interesting that the average prediction on VGC came very close to the actual NPD estimates, based on RolStoppable's table.) |
Sorry if late, had a lot to do. Anyway:
first, let's just start saying that every times, i give a chance to everything. Literally everything, because the industry is a weird place and we can't really be sure of nothing. Like, if you ask me: can XB1 outsell PS4 lifetime worldwide by the end of the generation? I'll tell you yes, is possible. Of course there are predictions and predictions, XB1 outselling PS4 worldwide is something that probabily has like 1% chance or less lol, and i surely don't think it will, but like everything, i would respect if someone predict that, expecially if he has arguments, as much as i would disagree.
Now, in this case, Switch outselling PS4 in every NPD of 2018 was for SURE a safest prediction, and of course i said there was a chance, and unlike the example before, i also was kinda confident on it because you know, at the time the last NPD we knew was December with Switch at 1.5 million and PS4 at 1.08 million.
But yeah, i didn't expect Switch to win every months, i was sure PS4 would have won some months, like April i wasn't too sure at the time, while right now of course i have no doubt PS4 will take it, and November too was a candidate for PS4, and well, many months in general.
What i really didn't expect was Switch losing the Q1, that was really unexpect.
The PS4 performed literally as i expect. If you look at my predictions in the NPD, you can see that literally every 3 months my PS4 predictions were super spot on: basically i was expecting a great Q1, but not as big as last year. Which looks the case (as PS4 is slighly down YOY)
Problem was Switch performance. Way worse than i expected. That line up seriusly hurted more than i thought, having only Kirby as a big game was not a good idea, but i thought that the "many shortages" it had in 2018 would have kinda boosted the firsts months of 2018, so even with a bad line up i would have expected very strong numbers for Switch.
While Switch numbers are still looking very good, they are not at the same level i expected. But that's fine, like i said, i just underestimate the negative effect a bad line up would have been. And after all, i also suspected that first half of 2018 could have been not the best, the big numbers for Switch will be this holiday with Smash, Pokémon, and in general a strong line up.
That said, i think is clear that even if i'm still very confident saying that Switch will beat PS4 in 2018, saying "PS4 can't come close unless it has insane promotion" was just wrong. Whatever happen, PS4 definitively could beat Switch, or at least come close withouth those promotions.
I guess we'll see, like i said right now 2018 for PS4 is literally the same i was expecting in USA (a bit different in Japan as i didn't expected that big boost from MHW, but even there my PS4 expectations seem fine), indeed i don't think i'll be much off with the final numbers.
Switch is just harder to predict because is new and has a bigger sales curve. I'm fine if i maybe overestimated a first quarter in one country, because so far my Switch predictions are still looking very good. Back in January 2017 i predicted 15 million Switch shipped, that was hard back in the days where many people still were thinking Switch may have performed bad or just not as good, and in the end i was less than 1% off the mark (14.86 million shipped).
So we'll see, for this year i was expecting Switch doing somewhere between 20 and 25 million. I really wanted to predict 25 million, indeed i think i mentioned it some times (withouth saying it was my prediction tho), but i knew that was kinda "high". So yeah, right now 20 million is my prediction. Basically what Nintendo expect.
Hope i was clear, sorry for the long comment.
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