PS4/XBO/NS - 2019 vs 2020; WEEK FIFTY-THREE!! GAME! SET! MATCH!

[PAOerfulone]

dmillos32 said:

Hi @PAOerfulone First of all, Thank you for this amazing thread, it is a lot of work and it is cool to see it. 

I was wondering how you do your projections. I have a couple of questions.

1) How many weeks are going to be counted towards December this year? As far as I can tell, only weeks that end (on saturday) inside a month count, therefore only weeks ending on Dec 5,12,19 and 26 will count, the one ending on Jan 2 will count towards next year. Is that correct?

2) I noticed tiny discrepancies in three different weeks, these are weeks that recently got revised so that might have caused the difference:

Week	VGChartz	Post	Diff
26	395987	395387	600
46	618876	618176	700
47	736541	736941	-400

3) My best guess is that you are currently taking the % de switch is ahead of itself from 2019 (about 52%) and you are multiplying that by how much the switch did in 2019's last three weeks.

It is really hard for a console to maintain these high margins during holiday season. When comparing 2019 and 2018 the switch was able to increase by about 9% 

Last 3 weeks
Week	2018	2019	Diff
-2	1,319,351	1,369,224	104%
-1	1,452,755	1,554,176	107%
Last	774,701	926,543	120%
3WeekTotal	3,546,807	3,849,943	109%

If the switch is able to mantain a 9% increase from 2019, then the last three weeks should be around 4,178,987 units for a total of 27,623,336 in 2020.

4) Just as an example, on september the switch was up almost 80% from 2019, and now it is about 52%

Once again, thank you for a wonderful post and I will be watching closely to see what ends up happening.

Hey @dmillos32, I see you're a new user who just recently joined. In case it hasn't been done already, allow me to be the first to say to you "Welcome to VGChartz!"

And thank you for following this thread and for your support and enthusiasm!

To answer your questions:

1) 5 weeks will be counted to December. I am well aware of the slippery slope of that Dec.-Jan. week where we go into the new year and "Will that count for this year or next year?" The key in that is to look for how many days of that week are in this year, and how many are in the next. For example: Since this particular week in question ends on Jan. 2nd, that means that week will include 2 days of the next year, while the other 5 days will be from this year. As a result, that week will be counted for this year, making this December a 5 week period. That's why this year is a 53-week year as opposed to a 52-week one.

2) Thank you for pointing out those discrepancies. When you have to go back and update ALL the numbers for 4 different regions dating back to the beginning of the year, there will be a few weeks here and there that will slip through the cracks. So thank you for catching that for me. I just made those changes and updates.

3) What I do is I take last year's sales, how much it sold up to the current week last year, and divide it by its final yearly total. From there, I get a percentage. I take the current yearly total for THIS year and divide it by that percentage. And that's where I get the projections for this year.

For example: Let's look at the Switch: At this point last year, the Switch sold 15,428,595 units. So I take that stat and I divide it by 19,278,788 units, which is it's final yearly total. So, it looks like this:

15,428,595/19,278,788 = .8002886385 (80.02886385%)

Now, I take its current yearly total for this year. As of this moment, the Switch has sold 23,445,249 units in 2020 thus far. So, I'll take that and divide it by the percentage:

23,445,249/.8002886385

And that leads me to the current projection of: 29,295,991 units.

And those projections are ALWAYS changing. Every time we get new numbers and I update the tables or make adjustments, that projection changes. And as the year progresses, we get closer and closer to the actual total to where we can make a ballpark estimate.