RolStoppable said:
The difference isn't necessarily 5m+, it's not even likely to be that big. "More than 63 million" also applies for values just under 64m, nevermind that Nintendo's sell-through figures for Switch have always been on the low side, so the gap between sell-through and shipments has commonly been unusually big. It's not unusual for retailers to place large orders in September already, especially for a console like Switch which has been in short supply for an extended period of time. Nintendo counts units as shipped before they have arrived at retailers, hence why I refered to these as units in transit as opposed to units on store shelves. I don't think retailers will do any stockpiling, it's just that the sell-through of these units could not possibly be recorded by September because these large shipments were still in transit. A shame that we only get Famitsu and NPD numbers, so it's difficult to put the pieces of the puzzle together. October NPD should be big. But the biggest year over year growth in shipments occured in Europe and Other where we rarely get numbers from. |
True of course that it could be close to 64 million, in which case we'd be looking at something closer to a 4.5 mil difference.
I did consider the fact that maybe they had a huge amount in transit at the end of September, but those shipments should have arrived by now and if they are indeed not stockpiling that would probably be noticable. I suppose its possible that we will see a very big NPD October, but Famitsu numbers haven't seemed all too different as of late (a couple of 100k weeks, but we've seen that before this year).
For now I'm leaning mostly towards Nintendo lowballing the estimate, though it is possible that the gap is bigger than I had thought.
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