Global Hardware Dec 20-26 - Switch Outsells Lifetime 3DS Sales

[The_Liquid_Laser]

dmillos said:

The_Liquid_Laser said:

Ok, that is a good find.  Perhaps this is normal after all?  I think the portion of the week that happens before Dec 25 does make a difference.

Also, I believe Asia dropped only a little because of Japan.  Their holiday season seems to happen slightly later than much of the rest of the world.  That may be true in some other Asian cultures as well, but Japan contributes a very large portion of the sales in the Asian category.

Hi @The_Liquid_Laser I thought just like you did, that the amount of days before chirstmas does play a vital role in any growth for that week. Your comment made me want to explore that idea, I think you will like what I found. Basically I looked at every week that included christmas eve for every console, and measured its growth:

A very interesting pattern shows up, when there are at least 5 days before Christmas, almost all consoles increase on this week. And the relation is strictly proportional to the amount of days before. 2020 Seems to be the only exception to this rule. 

Like I mentioned before, a chart like this doesn't give us any answers, it just sparks curiosity and it brings the question of why would something like this happen?

Obviously stock shortages come to mind, or perhaps that the numbers could get revised later, or the lack of new games affected the week? There are many possibilities, what do you think could have happened?

Here is also a chart of days before vs growth (excluding this year):

This is probably why you and I (and probably others) were actually hoping for the NS to have higher sales than last week.

Anyways this shouldn't take away from the fact that having 1.2M units sold in one week isn't an amazing number, maybe the bar was just too high from the previous week.

What I do in a situation like this is I come up with a hypothesis that explains the data, but I try to be willing to change it in light of new information, especially since there are several possible explanations.  Usually I just say what I am guessing without explicitly saying it is a hypothesis though.

In this case, my guess (hypothesis) would be that there are shortages in most regions, especially for the Switch base model.  Of course I will be very eager to see Nintendo's quarterly report to see if it has any information that would strengthen or weaken that hypothesis.  The second most likely explanation is that adjustments need to be made.  We'll just have to wait and see.

Btw, thank you for doing all of this research.  It is very helpful.