Farsala said:
No idea, due to the timing (up to Sept 31) and shipment vs sales gap. Nintendo shipped (2.6m) which is less than Famitsu said was sold (3.4m), but that doesn't account for possible last year's leftover shipments. And shipments may have caught up to the sales by now. It is just a bit of speculation from me. |
If it's true they can just lump missed sales into a given week (or take them out of a random week to even things out) then it could also be possible Famitsu has already been adding extra Switch sales this year due to undertracking in previous years. We can't know either way for sure.
Comparing the Famitsu YTD to Nintendo 9mnth shipments is not directly possible IMO with only 1 datapoint (2022)... for a start Famitsu's week 1 started 27th December 2021, aka the biggest sales week of the year in Japan. We don't know for sure when Nintendo counts from for shipping (most likely just direct months though, so Jan1st to Sep30th) but no matter how fast the hardware gets to the stores shipping always precedes sales.
The huge sales weeks for Famitsu weeks 1-3 at least were all probably units shipped before 2022. It might be possble to get a clearer picture if someone checks the historical difference between lifetime sales on Famitsu vs each of Nintendos shipment figures since launch (to see if the "stock" situation is regularly smaller or larger after certain quarters). For example at the end of September the LTD shipments were 26.96 million, whereas Famitsu has sales at 26.36 million as of Oct 2nd... 600k doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
