Shadow1980 said:
For March? Yes. For April? Big games often have a residual effect into their second month. For the rest of the year? No chance. Just so we're clear on that regard, that way nobody misrepresents my point. No one game has ever caused a long-term increase in baseline sales, not even modest growth. Every single instance on record of a game causing a boost in sales has always been a very short-term one. Pretty much everybody that buys a system for a specific game does so within the first month or two of that game's release. AC gave an assist for the first month or two after its release, but there's no reason to think it was moving any appreciable amount of surplus hardware going into late spring/early summer and beyond. Prior to the pandemic, the only things that have been proven to cause substantial long-term increases in sales were price cuts and major hardware revisions. Both of those can be ruled out for the Switch. Meanwhile, we saw clear evidence of an across-the-board increase in demand not just for the Switch, but for the PS4 & XBO as well. Also, there's another good argument against the idea that AC was still driving the majority of growth well beyond its release month. While numbers have been scarce for the U.S., we do have numbers for Japan, and they show what we see with every other game in the history of ever: declining sales over time. As with hardware, there's only a certain number of of people out there willing and able to buy a particular game. Software is almost always extremely front-loaded, with often times half or more of lifetime sales coming in just the first month. Sometimes you get games with decent legs, but even those see sales months down the road that are vastly less. Animal Crossing is no exception. While in absolute terms it's still selling well enough to remain on the charts, relative to its initial sales it has declined substantially. It sold more in its first three weeks than it has in the past ten months. Assuming its digital sell-through consistently averaged around 50% of total sales (that was the overall figure as of August from what I've read), it sold over 3.7M copies its first week alone. It took that to drive the Switch to 392k units in the same week. That means that over 9 copies of AC sold for every single Switch sold. At best, of those 3.7M people that bought a copy of AC that week, maybe 9% of them bought a Switch just for that game. The remaining ~91% of copies were bought by preexisting Switch owners. And the ratio of copies of AC sold per Switch unit sold declined rapidly over time, especially after April. By September, there were fewer copies of AC sold than Switches sold. In the NPD-equivalent January sales period, maybe 260-270k copies of AC sold against 563k Switches sold (the Switch's best non-holiday month for hardware since March, perhaps not coincidentally the same month the Diet declared a state of emergency in response to increasing COVID cases). If it took well over 3M copies to push the Switch to nearly 400k in one week, what do you think a mere 7% of that sales level is going to do? Unless its system-selling power has increased exponentially to the point where the vast majority of people who are buying a Switch are doing so just for AC, there's no way in hell AC is still a driver of HW sales growth. And there almost certainly isn't some ludicrous digital ratio that has materialized in the past few months that has kept total sales insanely high relative to initial sales, making up for the declines in retail sales, as shipment figures corroborate the decline in sales. While we are lacking a lot of data for the U.S., it appears that AC probably sold over 3M in March physical+digital (it could be substantially higher as we never got the actual retail sell-through; it's highly likely to be more comparable to Japanese sales). Physical-only declined to 180k in both August and September, so again assuming a roughly constant 50% digital sell-through rate, that's only 360k, give or take, a decline of 88% or more from March (retail sales in Japan in the September period were only 5.3% of what they were in March, so 88% could be a bare minimum). To echo the question I proposed for the Japanese side of things, if it took 3M or more copies of AC plus the start of the pandemic to shift at best an extra 600-700k units, what is a tiny fraction of that going to shift months afterward? I honestly doubt any serious commentator would sit there with a straight face and tell me that essentially all of the improvements we saw in August & September over the same months in 2019 were due to just AC. We see this story repeat for other games we have sales information for. Sales start off very high for a popular game, but the vast majority of those copies went to preexisting owners of a platform. It sells millions of copies but moves maybe at most a few hundred thousand extra hardware units, far less than that the next month if there's any residual effect at all. There's no reason to think that the Switch was somehow mostly insulated from the effects of the pandemic and somehow, nor that Animal Crossing has seemingly supernatural system-selling capability. To reiterate the point I've made over and over, there's a reason why the average prediction assumed at best flat sales in 2020, even with AC being a known factor at the time those predictions were made. Nobody in their right mind in Jan. 2020 would have dared to propose that a single game could move that much hardware. If you think something besides the pandemic was the primary driver, you need to prove it. Prove that AC was the primary reason there was a large surge in demand, that over 2.5M people in the U.S., over 1.3M of that in the May to October, period, were driven to do so not because of general increased demand for at-home entertainment, but mostly for one game in specific. Also, can you rule out conclusively that AC's surge in popularity itself wasn't attributable in large part to the pandemic, that its popularity relative to other entries in the series was purely coincidental? Last time I asked for proof that a single game was capable of moving millions of surplus hardware units by itself, nobody had any real evidence to offer. Most of it boiled down to "It's a popular game!" Lots of games have been popular. Some have set new records. Some have managed ridiculously high attach rates (and note that buying a game with a system is not the same as buying the system for that game; see also GTAV's ridiculous legs on PS4 & XBO). None, not even the biggest killer apps in history, have ever produced anywhere near the level of growth that some people want to attribute to Animal Crossing. I think the people who want AC to be the rule-breaker and record-destroyer do so purely for reasons of optics, because attributing the vast majority sales growth we've seen over the past year (and essentially all of it since probably May) to an external factor apparently diminishes the Switch's success in some people's eyes. It's an artifact of the nature of online discussions about electronic toys. That's my honest opinion. I keep repeating the same data points only for people to dismiss them out of hand for reasons not supported by any kind of real counter-evidence. This has been going on for months. Going this in-depth requires a considerable time investment on my part (several hours for just this thread, including both writing and data collection), and I'm done repeating the same arguments. You know where I stand, and I've presented all the data I possibly can. If you or anyone else has any new data to add, I'm all ears. Until then, I'm moving on to other topics of discussion. |
There have been past cases of games have acted as system sellers for extended periods beyond a month or two; Pokemon, Wii Sports, Halo...
Just so we're clear, I never attributed 2020's sales boost entirely on Animal Crossing, as I've said multiple times there are other factors, but we cannot dismiss the impact of a game that became a cultural phenomenon in a way that only a few games per generation or decade ever do, especially when reaching new audiences is such a key part of its success.
I am supremely confident that, had the pandemic never happened, Switch still would have peaked post-2019.
Without Covid after all we likely would've seen games like Monster Hunter Rise and Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury in 2020 instead of early 2021 to counteract the absence of the covid factor, and the system still would've had revisions, price cuts, and system sellers like AC, MH Rise, Pokemon Diamond/Pearl & Legends, Splatoon 3, BOTW2, etc after the three year mark.
There's just no reason for it to have peaked in its first three years given how many of its cards it had (and still has) yet to play beyond that point. And "other totally different devices peaked in their first three years" doesn't constitute evidence to my view.
Last edited by curl-6 - on 25 March 2021
