Yes I'll deny any possibility of a company throwing away money for no good reason. For they to have 4M available at launch they would have to postpone launch for some months and incur in unecessary cost. And again as Intrisic have put no company have done this, but for some reason Nintendo that couldn't produce enough to meet demand because of part constraint would do it just to win your argument.

Yes. And is that valid for products that even after reading demand they fail to meet for 2 years?

I gave you good and logical possibilities why that maybe would make sense, and why thats not throwing away money, you ignoried all that and you were acting like evrething was set in stone, lol. Again, you dont know that, if plan from start would be holiday season launch and around 4m prepared consoles from launch. Again, Nintendo never didnt said they couldn't produce more than 2m for Switch launch, just that initial plan was to prepare 2m for launch and that they later had problem to increase that number, but if initial plan was to have bigger number stock for launch they could probably prepare more. Stock problem after launch is different thing, because maybe they had plan  to produce around 500k per month and they needed much more than that beacuse console was selling better than 500k and and factories couldn't start producing much more than that so soon.

Dunno what was the case with Wii. Nintendo was probably overly conservative and didn't wanted any stock staying in storerooms. Well, they had plenty of units in storage with the WiiU.

But the Wii is the outlier here. Which other console had supply constraints over an extended period of time globally? Look, the Switch goes well, but is by now long available in most parts of the world. Dunno if Japan is still supply constrained, but maybe they still can't access supply correctly there or demand is increasing in the time they ramp up production and so invalidating the earlier research. But in the US or europe Nintendo meets demand. Same for PS4, it was not for long supply constrained.

Well, I can understand being conservative even with preorders on launch, but shortages for 2 years straight can't be only being conservative.

For Switch it took 8 months(?) to get to attend demand and for PS4 about 4 months. So we can't really be confident of how much the impact of a different launch window would be.

If we're going to be comparing early sales, release timing must be taken inrepresent a larger share of early-life sales:

On average, Week 1 represented 52% of sales in the first five weeks for the Q1 releases, while for holiday releases that number drops to 35%. This continues to hold true even if we extend that range of weeks:

That's an average Week 1 share of 41% for Q1 releases but only 26% for holiday releases. Let's extend it all the way to 26 weeks, giving us half a year of sales:

And we see an average share of 22.7% for Q1 releases but only 16.8% for holiday releases. We start to see significant outliers in this ten-system sample at this point: the PS4 and Wii U. Both were systems that had reasonably good launch weeks but had dreadful baseline sales early on, which incidentally were roughly equal to each other, as we see in this comparison of sales for the first 39 weeks/9 months:

But those first five weeks favored the Wii U, because it was a holiday launch while the PS4 was released in February. That resulted in the PS4 running at a somewhat semi-stable deficit for a while, taking over a year for it to start to fully reverse the trend, close the gap, and surpass the Wii U in LTD sales:

Of course, this is just Japan. I started with them because their sales trackers track sales on a weekly basis. NPD only tracks sales on a monthly basis. However, an examination of NPD data heavily suggests similar trends. While systems are more likely to release in Q4 in North America, we still have several major systems released in the past 20 years that launched before Q4: the Dreamcast, GBA, PSP, 3DS, and Switch. Whenever a system releases prior to October, it always exhibits a pronounced drop in its second month. This does not really happen with Q4 launches. The largest November-to-December drop proportionally of any November launch system was the PS4, which saw a 24.3% drop, yet even that wasn't enough to keep it from having the second-largest first December of any Q4 launch system (the XBO edges it out), and the PS4's first December was over 3.18 times larger than the January following it. Now it is true that all three home consoles released last gen were November launches and had weak launches relative to their baseline levels thanks to supply constraints (and high price in the PS3's case), but they nevertheless did not see any big drops in December; had they had sufficient supply to meet demand, their launches would have been much better, but we probably wouldn't have seen dramatic improvements to sales in their first full calendar year (well, except maybe the Wii).

Meanwhile, the smallest drop any of the listed pre-Q4 systems saw in its second month was the PSP, which saw a 43.4% drop from its launch month to its second month. Every other system saw sales drop by more than half in their second month. Here's every launch month to second month drop for Gen 6-8 systems launched prior to Q4:

DC: -70%
GBA: -58.6%
PSP: -43.4%
3DS: -51.3%
NS: -69.2%

This indicates that, like in Japan, systems launched prior to Q4 exhibit a rapid decline towards baseline sales as they lack anything in the weeks following launch to sustain sales above baseline levels, while systems released during the holiday season continue to benefit from the holiday sales sales period in the weeks between launch and Christmas week.

TL;DR: Launching during the holidays does have a clear, demonstrable effect on sales, with an obvious causal mechanism in play. This tends to favor Q4 launches when comparing LTD sales, at least for early-life sales (the effect does of course wear off over time).

TL;DR: Launching during the holidays does have a clear, demonstrable effect on sales, with an obvious causal mechanism in play. This tends to favor Q4 launches when comparing LTD sales, at least for early-life sales (the effect does of course wear off over time).

Thanks alot for this. Data always beats assumptions. According to this we could expect that launching in the holidays might give a boost of 5-10% of the sales of the first half year - at least in Japan.

To the people claiming this can't be because supply constraints dominating sales: Supply is dependent on how much the company produces. The underlying assumption in your argument is, that this number is constant. But while there is no infinite production capacity, the production is strongly dependent on how much the console cpmpany orders from manufacturers like Foxconn, Pegatron and the like. So, they look at preorders, market research and some common sense and make educated guesses how much they do order. So in the holidays their research indicates higher demand, so they probably supply more units. This explains the data Shadow compiled.

Nope man, the fact that I don't consider they valid doesn't mean I ignored, it means it isn't enough reason to justify the cost. If they are doing a full year run to sell 25M, there is very little reason to not be able to adjust production to end up overproducing 5M and shipping that on the next quarter. Because first they would be producing their regular amount, second there would be the already shipped amount, third the FYQ1 would be a slower month so that 5M would be sitting on Nintendo shelves for over 1 quarter just to use your supposed bargain.

They never said they couldn't produce more than 2m... but after launch they showed they couldn't by not being able to have steady production at all to meet your supposed production level.

If you produce 500k/month you would need to stock for 8 months (instead of 4 months) prior to launch, go again and do the maths on the cost of having all that sitting on shelves (8 months at an average 2M consoles stored at 299 USD value... that is 600M dollars on 8 months, that would have a financial cost of some dozen million).

I gave you good and logical possibilities why that maybe would make sense, and why thats not throwing away money, you ignoried all that and you were acting like evrething was set in stone, lol. Again, you dont know that, if plan from start would be holiday season launch and around 4m prepared consoles from launch. Again, Nintendo never didnt said they couldn't produce more than 2m for Switch launch, just that initial plan was to prepare 2m for launch and that they later had problem to increase that number, but if initial plan was to have bigger number stock for launch they could probably prepare more. Stock problem after launch is different thing, because maybe they had plan  to produce around 500k per month and they needed much more than that beacuse console was selling better than 500k and and factories couldn't start producing much more than that so soon.

The months are about right. You need months to get a contract with a manufacturer, get the supply chain running, get the quality in order and so on. Then you have shipping, that probably takes around a month. So between the decision in Sony or Nintendo headquarter: 'we need more units' and more units hitting the market I would guess 3-6 months. And it's still a guessing game, you have to guess right how much more demand you have to meet, otherwise you sit on unsold inventory and that costs too.

As I said Wii was an outlier. What happened there, your guess is as good as mine. But what we see from PS4 and Switch is what to expect from successful consoles.

But back to the argument that holidays have no impact at sales at launch because of supply constraints: that assumes fixed production capacities. That would mean thought through, that if demand is lower than workers at Sony or Nintendo sit around, as they have nothing to do. Obviously production capacity can be scaled to demand, as it is given to outside companies doing that stuff. So supply constraints are mainly a wrong guess about the demand.

No, I gave you good and logical possibilities why that maybe would make sense, and why thats not throwing away money, you ignored all that and you were acting like everything was set in stone. It's pointless to reply any more on this matter.

Again, initial stock plan for launch, and increasing production after launch are two totally different things.

I used that number like example production after launch where they selling everything they ship and they need higher production, not before launch.