Global Hardware 16 March 2019

[Bofferbrauer2]

colafitte said:

I know some of you are trying a new joke, but now seriously, how many consoles (handhelds or home consoles) have sold around 15M finishing its 6th year(2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 6 complete years) at 300$ base price (in case PS4 does that at the end of 2019 which seems more than possible), after already sold almost 100M the year before....?. That's unprecedented. What Switch, 3DS, etc are doing.... is not.

This passive aggresive attitude in forums like this..., i can't understand it. How difficult it's to admit Switch is doing amazing and PS4 is doing it too, each on their own terms?.

On topic: People seem to not learn from last year when some people expected 20M sold for Switch, and even more and we are seeing again some predictions of 25-30M this year....Nintendo already said they expect to ship 17'5M this FY and that's what's going to happen. VGC correctly tracked Switch ending 2018 at about 29'5M sold to consumers with almost 3M units on shelves. So let's say Switch sells to consumers 3'5M this year at the end of March (which is the pace VGC is showing). That will put Switch around 33M sold to consumers by March end. So if they reach their target of 17'5M shipped for the FY that will put shipment almost at 35'0-35'5M. That's still 2'0-2'5M units on shelves, and at this period of the year that's a lot. So, maybe they won't reach the goal, or Switch is selling even better than VGC is showing. That's why we should wait first to see official shipment numbers before expecting what Switch is going to do in 2019 and beyond...And expecting Switch to sell from 16M in 2018 to more than 25M in 2019 is almost ridiculous....Let's see first if they can match a pace that take the console to 19-20M first.

@bolded: PS2, PS3, Xbox 360 and the DS and Gameboy if you include handhelds. So not as rare as you might think.

@underlined: This is because the age doesn't factor nearly as much as you might think. But the real problem is that many Sony fans seem to feel it necessary to point that out over and over and over and over again, and generally to downplay the success of the Switch. Of course, at one point one can get sick and tired of it and counter accordingly.

I don't think anybody is denying that the PS4 is doing great, but trying to rub it in that it very narrowly beat a Switch on drought just doesn't go over well.

@the rest of the text:

I don't expect 25-30M to be sold this fiscal year (which started today, incidentally), but considering the amount of high profile titles the console is getting throughout summer and fall (plus anything that Nintendo or anybody else didn't tell us yet), I find it hard to believe those who expect less than 20M. The baseline is already well up compared to last year despite the lack of new titles yet. There may be no Smash this year, but everything else that comes more than outweighs the Smash/PLG duo that is responsible for most of the sales this past year, directly or indirectly.