July NPD 2020: Switch 340K, PS4 150K, XB1 17k (rip)

[Bofferbrauer2]

Shadow1980 said:

javi741 said:

How about NSMB for the DS, once that game launched DS sales exploded and never looked back.

Also, like Curl-6 said, you need to stop using historical patterns in consoles to determine the future of the Switch since the Switch is pretty much throwing every past historical pattern out the window at this point. The Switch will be one of Nintendo's greatest selling consoles ever, and we've never seen a Nintendo system in the past having software/hardware attach rates this high at this point in its life. Meaning that more than ever people are buying the Switch right now solely for the games, it wasn't like the Wii where the sales were full of soccer moms who just wanted to try out Wii Sports, or even the DS where the install base wasn't as dedicated towards Nintendo games as they are now. 

Worldwide this year even without Covid the Switch would've peaked. You're severely underestimating the affect AC is having on the Switch. AC may potentially be the greatest selling exclusive game of all time and the fact that it sold nearly 11 Million in 1 quarter and 22 million in a matter of 3 months is unprecedented for an exclusive game AND IT WASN"T EVEN RELEASED in the Holiday season like most major AAA exclusive games. The game is a global phenomenon unlike anything we've seen before, even Nintendo went out of their way in their financial report to say that these Switch sales have been largely attributed to AC.

Also, how about when Pokemon Red and Blue released for the OG Gameboy in 1998. The Gameboy sales exploded for years on end despite being a nearly 10 year old system after that games release.

It was the DS Lite that caused DS sales to explode, not NSMB, which came out the previous month in the U.S. and did nothing for sales. In Japan, NSMB was released a number of weeks after the DS Lite. The Lite clearly was the primary driver of sales growth in Japan as well, and while NSMB did provide an additional boost, it was only for like a week or two.

If you're going to assert "the Switch is pretty much throwing every past historical pattern out the window at this point," well, I invite you to provide your evidence that it totally subverting all the "rules of sales." Be specific, and cite specific data points.

As for the Game Boy, the late 90s spike was because of the Game Boy Color, which, while technically and officially an upgraded Game Boy, was treated as an entirely new system by the market.

While I have never been able to find monthly data for the Game Boy in the U.S., I was able to get hold of yearly sales data some years back (might have been from GAF), and while the Game Boy sold 2.9M units in 1998, up from 2.1M in 1997, most if not all of that came from the Color, which NPD tracked separately, and they had it at ~990k for 1998. The GBC was released in November 1998, two months after Pokemon R&B. It wasn't until 1999 that the full effects of the GBC were felt, with the Game Boy selling 7.2M units that year, nearly 90% of which was from the Color. Without more granular (i.e., monthly) sales data, we cannot tell for sure what happened in 1998. Pokemon was a brand new and unproven franchise in the U.S., so it may not have been an immediate system-seller. We don't know what it sold in September (the month Pokemon came out) or in November (the month the Color came out), or for the rest of months of that year, for that matter. Hell, we don't even know exactly how many copies Pokemon sold that year. But we do know that new hardware models often have major stimulative effects on hardware sales, and when they do it always far outstrips the ability of individual games to move hardware.

Pokemon R&G came out in Japan in 1996, but because of the lack of sales data we cannot determine what effects it had when it was released. But the GB Color did provide a boost to Game Boy sales, which suggests that the Color, being a new and qualitatively better model, was also the primary booster of sales in the U.S.

It leaves the question open on Wii games. The Wii sold out it's stock as soon as it came in for years - but without the right games, it couldn't have done so. And while I don't have hard data to back this up due to the aforementioned stock situation, I'm pretty sure several games like Mario Kart Wii and Wii Fit had a long-lasting sales boost effect, and one which would have been visible had the Wii been able to sell that much.

Also, I think Agente is partly right. the Lite did the heavy lifting, but again, without great games to go along, the Lite boost wouldn't have lasted that long. And NSMB certainly did help push the sales over an extended period of time.