Do you prefer I use a different word to discuss sales of a game when compared to hardware sales during the same period? Its obvious that for example, Animal Crossing has an existing customer base to sell to but most evergreen titles are selling at a % of new owners, in the case of some of them this % doesn't fluctuate.
Whether its lifetime attach rates or looking at it from an annual basis to get insight into future sales trends - to me it's the data that's revealed and what it could tell us about the future sales. Overall whether we call it to attach rates or legs, it's the number of new hardware owners that purchase "old" software at mostly full price.
Lifetime attach rate is also an interesting topic:
New Horizon Week 12: 14.69%
New Horizon Week 20: 32.95%
New Horizon Week 27: 35.86%
It will be interesting to look back at this over the course of the year, but once it reaches 40% it won't drop in 2020. Its drop will also be lower than Smash's drop in it's second year which was 24% or Splatoon 2's 33%. New Horizon despite launching in March 2020, will probably have around 40% attach rate for 2021. It will outperform Smash because it's bringing much bigger new demographics to the Switch. Based on Splatoon 2, Smash, Pokemon Sword/Shield drops in their second year 1.5M is the least it can do next year. The real interesting part will be if it can maintain 20% in it's 3rd year on the market.
We are witnessing History in Japanese Videogaming a record that no one thought any game would ever hit will be broken on a device that is twice to three times more expensive than the DS depending on it's the form factor. The success of the Switch and the upcoming domination of Nintendo on its home market is an unprecedented fact that we are beginning to witness.
We haven't even gotten into the fact that this will basically make Animal Crossing one of the biggest IPs in the World, TV Rights/Movie rights alone would be evaluated in the trillions.
Last edited by noshten - on 12 July 2020
