February NPD 2021: Switch~614k, PS5 ~300K, XBS <175k

[PDiddy]

Shadow1980 said:

PDiddy said:

First off, thank you for actually putting out your yearly predictions. Your percent drops seem somewhat reasonable, and I would advise you do not use Nintendo's internal sell-through estimates. As strange as it seems, their estimates have become increasingly unreliable.

Second off, I will admit that DS will be near unbeatable in Europe for Switch, and though it seems the DS's lead against Switch in Japan is insurmountable, there is enough life in the Switch for it to beat the DS. US is a bit of a toss up for me, and could go either way. But, RotW will be instrumental in the Switch's effort to beat DS.

I'm gonna need a source on that claim regarding Nintendo's sell-through. They seem plausible enough. We know that in 2020 the Switch sold 9M in the U.S., likely another ~1M in Canada given the usual U.S./Canada split, and 6M in Japan (using the NPD-equivalent 52-week sales period, not Famitsu's 2020 period). That's 16M right there. While there is often a decent margin of error associate with VGC's sales figures, their 7.4M figure probably isn't grossly off the mark, so that brings the total for the three main regions up to about 23.4M. Once we include RoW, that ~26M figure is probably pretty close.

Common sense? I doubt there is around 5 to 6 million Switches in a warehouse or in transit somewhere, and its fair to say that it's a bit harder to track Latin America and SEA excluding Japan than the major regions. The other weird error is that Nintendo seems to not include MyNintendo shipments in their total sell-through numbers for Japan, which we can prove out with the known lack of inventory during 2020, especially in April. It's fair to say that at least 500k of those shipments aren't included in their cumulative sell-through figures.