Shadow1980 said:
It's easy to claim in retrospect that the Switch would have still been up regardless. But prior to the pandemic, nobody was expecting massive growth, with many expecting declines and even optimistic predictions assuming relatively modest gains at best. For example, NPD's Mat Piscatella predicted the Switch would be down YoY in the U.S., and in the NPD 2020 full-year prediction thread on ResetEra, the average of all predictions was just under 6.4M, and the best prediction was 6.9M. It ended up selling about 9M. Animal Crossing was a known factor in January 2020, and people made their predictions accordingly. While it was going to be a system-seller, it might not have moved quite as many units (or sold quite as well in and of itself) had there been no pandemic, and losses elsewhere in the year could have negated those gains. Instead of 1M in March, the Switch might have only sold, say, 750k, but had it dropped even 5% overall for the April-Dec. period, the Switch would have been about flat overall for the year. A 10% drop for that period would result in it being down. And every indication prior to the pandemic was that the Switch was passing its peak, with YoY declines imminent. Getting to 7M would have required either March hitting 1M even without the COVID bump to assist AC (an unlikely outcome) or sales for the remaining 11 months of the year to have been at least slightly up. Nobody was expecting anything like a >10% bump in baseline sales (for reference, the Switch's sales for the May-Oct. period were up 76.8% YoY last year in the U.S., way beyond what anybody could have guessed).
https://www.ipsos.com/en-th/looking-escape-younger-people-more-likely-say-entertainment-costs-rose-covid-19 And it may sound counter-intuitive, but video games appear to be recession-proof, so even when unemployment is up there appears to be no negative impacts on spending on video games. Sales of game consoles (both home and handheld) actually increased in the U.S. during the 2007-09 recession. While a lot of people have been hurt by things like the late 00s recession or the pandemic, most were still gainfully employed and had money to spend. An unemployment rate of 20% means that 80% of people are still employed, and those that were unemployed due to the pandemic, well, they were still getting income (plus in the U.S. we got those stimulus checks). Without the pandemic, the Switch wouldn't have sold anywhere close to what it did without the pandemic. You don't get the kind of growth in baseline sales it saw under any kind of normal circumstances. Deep price cuts sometimes produce comparable growth, but rarely anything of that level, especially if the baseline was already healthy to begin with, and no single game has ever done anything like that by itself. The Switch's growth in 2020 was due to outside factors, which is corroborated by the PS4 & XBO as both also clearly demonstrated increased demand, at least as long as stock held out. The pandemic resulted in artificially increased demand for game consoles. Simple as that. EDIT:
I didn't see your post at first, but my reply is relevant to you, particularly the second half or so of it. |
You are basing you assumptions on analysis made mostly during March to June where demand for games and consoles skyrocket but is missing sources implying their sales and revenue kept so high for the whole year enough to drive a monstrous ~45% increase for Swotch YoY
The only source that you bring that really shows meaningful data (ie data from what happaned during the whole 2020, not predictions made by July or August) shows a 35% increase on consumer spending but curiously attribute this not for Switch over performance, but the sucessful launch of PS5 and Series S/X, hence this hardware spending increase was very likely to happen regardless of Covid peaking or not, maybe not as high as 35%, but high still
I'm really waiting for some aggregated Software revenues spending in 2020 for console games to see any real increase in demand for games during 2020. Hardware revenues are easier to have outliers, years of launch are likely to have artificial increases due to pricing and whatnot, but software sales truly shows us if people is spending more on games or not
Important disclaimer, the thread title says "Why is Switch peaking later?", not "why Switch sold almost 30 million in 2020". If the question was the second, then I would agree that Covid was definitely important
I'm on the boat that Switch was going to peak last year regardless, in reality I would say without Covid Switch could very well peak in 2021 (the fifth year, rather than the 4th). People on internet making wrong predictions is a nonissue, people on this forum were predicting Switch to sell 40 million lifetime in the launch year, why predictions about Switch sales should be taken in consideration? I don't understand that point of your argument
