It's only a disaster to people who take these things too seriously.  But I shouldn't be surprised I've seen make a big deal over worse

It was tracked for December NPD.

It's only a disaster to people who take these things too seriously.  But I shouldn't be surprised I've seen make a big deal over worse

Yeah... i guess you're right. Still a shame that we can't discuss things like this correctly, it is the main reason why i come to forums like this...it's a stupid hobby, but a hobby i like nonetheless....

Yeah... i guess you're right. Still a shame that we can't discuss things like this correctly, it is the main reason why i come to forums like this...it's a stupid hobby, but a hobby i like nonetheless....

Here's how it works:

NPD doesn't track from first day of any given month to last day of the same month, but in either four or five weeks that start on Sundays. The first two months of any given quarter are 4-week-periods, the final month of any given quarter is a 5-week-period. That amounts to 52 weeks of tracking, or 364 days. This means every year has either one missing day or two if it's a leap year. Eventually that creates a misalignment of which weeks go to which month, such as the specific case you are talking about. NPD corrects this by changing the January tracking period to five weeks every five or six years depending on a specific rule. January 2018 was such a month, so this year the weeks of any given period align much closer with their respective months again.

I hope you realize that this works the other way around as well: People want the LTD number to be true because it suits their bias.

Yesterday I've responded to a post that outlined a previous big mistake in Nintendo's PR, and I did the maths if it's more likely or not that the current PR contains a mistake. That post wasn't challenged by anyone, either because nobody wants to do any maths or because it's more convenient to believe the 8.2m figure if no maths are done.

The one line in the current PR that nobody seems to have paid attention to is "Switch hardware grew by 115 percent compared to the same period last year." Since it isn't noted otherwise, this period should refer to Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday.

1. Looking at VGC's estimates for Black Friday week in 2017 (472k) and taking NPD results from last November into account (770k), it seems reasonable to assign ~400k to the five-day-period in 2017. So if 400k is the base value and sales grew by 115%, the result is 860k. Known NPD LTD for Switch through October 2018 is 7.38m (4.88m LTD in 2017, 2.50m in 2018). Adding 0.86m to 7.38m results in 8.24m or "more than 8.2m." This means all the rest of the November tracking period is unaccounted for in the announced LTD figure.

2. An alternative is that Switch performed notably worse than 400k during the five-day-period last year which would in turn raise its sales levels in the other weeks of the November NPD tracking period, all of which were before Black Friday. If we assign 300k as the new base value, the remaining weeks in 2017 average ~160k. What this means for 2018 is that 645k Switch consoles were sold during the five-day-period and the preceding two weeks average ~110k to get to a total of 860k and have a fully accounted for Switch LTD figure of "more than 8.2m." What we are looking at in this scenario is significantly lower momentum leading up to Black Friday week despite the preceding October NPD tracking periods showing average weekly sales of ~75k in 2017 and ~65k in 2018.

3. Running the middleground for completion's sake, 350k as the base value results in ~750k for the five-day-period in 2018, leaving a weekly average of only ~55k for the two preceding weeks of the November tracking period, if the PR's announced "more than 8.2m" figure doesn't leave any days out. That makes less sense than scenario 2.

Scenario 1 makes the most sense.