August NPD 2020: Switch 504k, PS4 197k, XBO 45k

[DonFerrari]

Shadow1980 said:

DonFerrari said:

We can even do a different TLDR.

A game can be a system seller for like 1 year or more, but not one that would make the system sell significantly above its average. Actually the games that keep releasing are actually system sellers that keep the console baseline sales, with big titles giving a spike of couple weeks to one month, while supporting that the average holds out.

Basically.

I bought an XBO in Nov. 2014 for the Master Chief Collection. That technically makes it a system-seller. Some people may on occasion have bought an XBO for the MCC long after the game was released. But there's no indication that caused any measurable sales growth. The same can probably be said for a lot of games, including niche titles. But for the most part, it appears that most people just get a system to get the system, and buy whatever games that are available to pique their interest. That's the baseline.

If a game causes a system with an average baseline of 50k units/week to jump up by an additional 5000 during its release week and sales go back to baseline the following week, that's a 10% boost for just one week. It could be easily overlooked as statistical noise unless the baseline was very flat. And when you're tracking sales on a monthly basis like the NPD Group does, that scenario I just mentioned would yield only a 2.5% increase for the whole month. Nobody would notice anything unusual. It takes a lot to cause a big spike for a whole month. That's why the number of games that are noticeable system-sellers in the U.S. is so low. In Japan, where sales are tracked weekly, we see a lot more obvious examples of games causing a spike in hardware sales, but even then the vast majority of games have minimal to no impact.

So yeah, there probably are a ton of system-sellers. A lot of them may even convince someone to buy a system for that game months after the game was released (maybe they were waiting for a sale, or didn't have the money earlier, or their store was out of stock, or whatever). But very few of them cause noticeable spikes in hardware sales, and of those that cause big spikes there has certainly been nothing like what some are attributing to Animal Crossing in the U.S.

You are absolutelly right. Sometimes the game was a system seller but it isn't possible to see because even though the person wanted the sytem because of that game perhaps that person didn't have the money at the time so saved and bought later. Other times the person simply wanted the system and would buy anyway at the moment person could and well that game was what they were looking for the most (like Nintendo evergreens tend to be). And most cases people want a certain collection of different games to buy the console so you would have to attribute 4 or more games as the reason for that purchase.

And yet none of that would show in the graphic because that is basically what sustain a sales curve over the years making the averages of that period of that. And only a very few games really show significant increase in sales for a given month, much less for several months later. After all it would even be hard to defend something like "why did you buy this console?" "Because of game X" "But why now instead of any of the previous 12 months?".

The real things that move the average sales curve were as you numbered, mainly price reductions and revisions.