November NPD 2018 Thread

[DonFerrari]

Shadow1980 said:

More charts!

 

Well, the XBO managed to barely hold on to its vanishing surplus over the 360. Looks like I my prediction for when it would fall behind was a bit off, since the XBO wasn't down YoY as much as I thought it would be. But unless it pulls off a miracle next month it will fall behind the 360. And when it does fall behind, that deficit will not go away.

But overall, current-gen sales for conventional consoles (PS+Xbox) are still strong, though not quite as strong as last year. The XBO was down 2.6% while the PS4 was down 6.4%. This is with deals comparable to last year. Now, that's not a big drop by any means, but it could be an early warning sign that both systems are about to enter the terminal decline phase of their lives. They are now at just shy of 51 million units sold LTD combined, and by the end of next month will likely be at over 53M. By comparison, at the end of 2011 the 360 and PS3 were at 52.65M. 2012 was when both of those systems began to irreversibly decline.

Now, I still hear the refrains about price cuts, but I still maintain that if the PS4 and/or XBO get a price cut, that it will be a modest one that doesn't affect sales much. Systems rarely get price cuts this late in life, and they never get deep cuts, so $50 is the most we should expect for the base models. And in those rare occasions when a system got a price cut this far into its life, it had negligible impact on sales. Sales of the slimline models might decline more slowly than they would in the absence of a price cut, and a $350 Pro and $400-450 X1X could spur a modest increase in upgrades, but Sony & MS are running out of customers to sell their systems to. There is a maximum addressable market for "conventional" consoles, with only so many households willing, able, and planning to buy one of a given generation at some point during that generation. The PS3 & 360 ended up at 70 million units sold lifetime in the U.S. between the two of them, and I doubt the PS4 & XBO will be able to expand the market substantially more than that. The decline is coming, if not next year then definitely the following year. And there were already some warning signs this year that it's already about to start. All of the PS4's YoY growth this year has been thanks to God of War, Spider-Man, and Red Dead. Take out April, September, and October and the PS4 is down YoY. Meanwhile, the boost to the XBO's sales from the X1X appeared to have exhausted itself by September, which was flat YoY, and while the X1X helped give the XBO its best Q1 ever this year, Q2 was only its second-best Q2, and Q3 was ranked fourth, ahead of only last year's underwhelming Q3. And now we have a December that's down, albeit only slightly.

Q1 2019 will be the first real test to see if the PS4 and XBO have exhausted their maximum sales potential, at least at their current regular price points. Combined PS3+360 sales were down 18% YoY in Q1 2012, and if the PS4 & XBO are down anywhere close to that, we might have gotten out answer to the "are they post-peak?" question. And it's worth pointing out that Q2 & Q3 2012 were even worse for the 360 & PS3, with combined sales dropping 33.7% and 35%, respectively, though Q4 was down by "only" 24% (possibly due to the increasing prevalence of big holiday deals). I could see permanent price cuts to the PS4 & XBO preventing drops that bad, but 2019 could be down at least 15% overall for the Q1-Q3 period.

 

Moving along to Nintendo's end.

The Switch's 2018 has, with only one month remaining to be counted, only 7% behind the PS4's 2015. The Switch will need to sell at least 1.87M in December to tie the PS4's 2015. Certainly a possibility if Smash can move enough units.

The Switch is also absolutely crushing the 3DS. Like, it's not even close. After 21 months on the market, the Switch has sold about 8.74M units, 36.7% more than the nearly 6.4M units the 3DS sold in its first 21 months. And the Switch has shown that its more than capable of supporting the U.S. market on its own. For Year 2 sales, the Switch has so far sold 17.7% more units than the 3DS & Wii U did in their second years. It fell short last year of beating combined 3DS+Wii U sales (thanks mainly to the 3DS having an amazing December in 2012, which was better than any month the PS4 or XBO have had), but it's made up for it this year, and with the big YoY boost for November total Year 1 + Year 2 sales for the Switch are now ahead. To beat total Year 3 sales for the 3DS & Wii U, the Switch will need to sell over 5.2M units next year. With the possibility of a price cut and/or a hardware revision and the guarantee of the debut of the first Gen VIII Pokemon game, I think it's safe to say it'll exceed that by a comfortable margin. I honestly think there's a really good chance that the Switch will sell over 30 million units lifetime in the U.S. It'll be at over half that by the end of next year.

I was wrong when I thought X1 was ahead of X360 for 3 years in USA, it is more like 5 years and also show that there haven't been a turn around by Xbox, unless they are talking about turn around in sales by decreasing.