| The_Liquid_Laser said: Shadow1980, thank you for this thoughtful post. I want you to know, for the record, that I don't think you are 100% wrong. Especially, if we focus the discussion back toward Switch sales, I think you have stumbled onto something that most others have missed. For the record, I think both Animal Crossing and COVID had boosted Switch sales in 2020, but I don't think either one is the actually the biggest cause. There is actually another sales factor going on that is not being accounted for. The console market is actually going through a transition/transformation period that the PC market already went through. If you go back 20-30 years, there were consumers buying laptop computers, but desktop computers were much more common. Today laptops are more common among typical consumers and smartphones are even more popular than laptops. (Although businesses tend to prefer desktop computers still.) If a person wants a really powerful computer for the best price, then desktop is still the way to go, so why do so many more people use laptops then? People tend to prefer the convenience of laptops, and you can often get one really cheaply if you are willing to get something really low powered. Of course, smartphones are even more convenient and can get even cheaper than that, which is why they are even more popular. This sort of phenomenon is described in books like The Innovator's Solution. The market as a whole often chooses a product that, on the surface, appears worse. In reality they are sacrificing raw functionality for improvements to reliability, convenience or price. This especially happens when the product with lower functionality gets "good enough". Laptops are still not as powerful as desktops, even today, but at a certain point most consumers decided that laptops were "powerful enough" and laptops encroached upon the desktop market. Many customers switched over to laptops and now laptops are more common outside of a business setting. The Innovator's Solution even describes the math behind this. The rate that the new market encroaches upon the old one can be described by an "S-curve", i.e. a logistic function. (The author uses the term S-curve, but the math term is actually logistic function.) It looks like an exponential function at first, but once the curve gets past the half way point, growth slows and eventually levels off into an "S" shape. So, if we bring all of this back to video games, then handheld and home consoles markets would be analogous to the laptop and desktop markets, respectively. At a certain point handheld systems should get "good enough" and encroach upon the home console market. If you look at the handheld market closely enough, then it should also be obvious when this happens: with the Switch. For the past two handheld generations, Nintendo has gone a different route with a 2-screen handheld system. They have kept the power levels down and tried to focus on games (like touchscreen games) that couldn't be played on a home system. All of this delayed the inevitable encroachment. But with the Switch, the power level of their handheld system shot way up compared to the 3DS, and they even included a dock so that it was easy to play the system on a TV. Nintendo is intentionally trying to encroach upon the home market. They don't just want former Wii U customers either. They are going for Playstation and XBox customers. If this is true, then what should the data look like? It should show that Nintendo is getting a bunch of extra customers that they didn't have on the 3DS or Wii U. At the end of the Switch's life we should see "extra" customers added to the Switch's install base like an S-curve. Since we are currently only about half way into the Switch's life, then this surplus is going to look like exponential growth at this point. And in fact, this is exactly we we do see. Look at the gap chart (the first chart) whenever trunkswd compares Switch vs. 3DS + Wii U. For both worldwide and the US, these curves strongly resemble exponential growth.
https://www.vgchartz.com/article/447667/switch-vs-3ds-and-wii-u-in-the-us-sales-comparison-january-2021/
https://www.vgchartz.com/article/447572/switch-vs-3ds-and-wii-u-sales-comparison-january-2021/ The Switch is really a handheld system that is also encroaching upon the home console market. That is the biggest factor causing the spike in Switch sales. They are taking future sales away from PS5 and X|S. It's not obvious now, because Switch launched significantly ahead of the other systems. Give it a few years though. It took a few years for Switch sales to really take off, and it will take a few years before it's obvious that the other systems are going to underperform. Switch is getting its sales growth by taking sales away from PS5 and X|S. The handheld market is encroaching upon the home console market, just like the laptop PC market already encroached upon the desktop PC market. |
