Global Weekly, 31st March 2018, Software

[Bofferbrauer2]

LethalP said:

konnichiwa said:
Would be an interesting thread. '(When) will Switch phyiscal software totals overtake Xbox one physical software totals.

There's no guarantee the Switch will sell more software than the Xbox One. The Switch won't have anywhere close the same attach rates as the Xbox, which has the best attach rates of any consoles other than PlayStation. Handhelds don't in general. Look at the Gameboy at 118 million hardware units, it sold 501 million software. The NES also sold 501 million software, but inside 61 million hardware units. It had nearly double the attach rate.

The Xbox will sell 500 million physical units in the end probably. The ps4 will do about 1.2-1.4 billion. Switch about 450 million. (if it sells above 90 million which is likely). 

You're giving the Switch the attach rate of a handheld like DS or PSP with just 5 games per system. However, Switch is largely tracking far ahead of the handhelds when it comes to attach rate. In fact, the attach rate is much closer to the one of the PS4 than it is to any handheld. After 63 weeks, Switch has an attach rate of 3.23, compared to 3.84 for the PS4 and between 2.00 (DS) and 2.36 (Vita) for the handhelds. While it tracks relatively low for home consoles, it still tracks far above any handheld.

Outside of such weeks where a big release comes out on the XBO, Switch is already outpacing the XBO in software sales despite only having about half the install base. I think 450M is way too low a target for Switch software sales. The 900M of the Wii are probably more the target of Nintendo in terms of software sales, and I think 700M is very achievable.

I don't think the XBO can sell 500M physical games anymore. After almost 5 years not only the XBO still hasn't reached half of that target, but also the software sales seems to be slowing down. Software sales were down a whopping 18% last year compared to 2016 and this so far year it's looking like it's going down yet again despite the increase in hardware sales.