Shadow1980 said:
Hard to say. The Switch being up YoY since March is clearly an artificial bubble fueled by the outbreak (the PS4 & XBO likewise saw big YoY jumps). It's YoY improvements had been generally trending downward, and it was even down YoY in January & February (assuming the best-guess estimates on Era weren't way under the mark). Those are signs that a system is closing in on the post-peak part of its life cycle. It's entirely possible that the recent console-buying bubble could front-load sales for this year, drawing away sales from later on this year. A lot of people that were waiting for this holiday to buy a Switch may have already bought one with their stimulus money. Even if that's not the case, it's still entirely possible that once this bubble is deflated that the Switch could be back to being flat or even down YoY. Over 2.3M Switches have been sold in the U.S. in the March-May period, the second-largest non-holiday 3-month period ever after the DS's 2.44M sold in the April-June period, and one of the biggest YoY jumps ever. It's also far better than the Switch's previous best non-holiday 3-month period of a bit over 1M in Jan.-March 2019 (that's excluding the Switch's actual first three months; it sold 1.35M in that time span, but two-thirds of that were in just launch month). This sort of anomalous spike could serve to deplete the remaining pool of future buyers. There's only so many people willing and able to buy any given system, after all, and something unexpected that encourages them to buy it sooner rather than later could result in worse sales further down the road than what might have otherwise happened. |
Animal Crossing is a big system seller and brings new market tier. The growth of Xbox and PS4 is not the same, in size or shape. With Animal Crossing, switch have new type of consumers, because of that, the sales have big grow, second motive is Covid.
