I was disappointed too with PS4 the moment it became clear Sony was not going to go all in with deals in the holiday season.

I think it is better for them to sold 18 mils PS4 with a good profit on each console than 20 with close to 0 profits.

It also shows that there still a lot of sales for PS4 in 2019, because if they sold that much at that price, it points to a good year for PS4 in 2019, and depending of price cuts, it could also surprise us again with better numbers than anticipated by most. If there is one console capable of that, is ps4.

Lets say Sony drop the price hard for PS4, 100 dollars per unit, and they got that 20 mil, hell, 21 million. So 3 million more

The result is that PS4 sold mere 2.73% more than it did overall in real life, and they cut off  quite like 2100000000 $

At the end of the day, money talks, BS walks.

I was disappointed too with PS4 the moment it became clear Sony was not going to go all in with deals in the holiday season. Before BF i expected this to be the best Holiday season for PS4 in USA thanks to RDR2, Spiderman, GOW, ...I can't blame Sony though, because they just sold the same as last year and probably they were more profitable this way, but we, in this forums, are romantics of great numbers, and i thought PS4 could easily had achieved 19-20M sold in 2018 if Sony wanted.

With Switch, the problem is that people go from overstimating to understimating it. If you sell close to 17M in your second year at $300 is an impressive result. But when you have people all year expecting Switch to be like Wii or DS, you are going to find people disappointed with numbers like this, and it's normal. Being disappointed by something doesn't mean that thing is bad or is doing bad. Switch did great and is going to do great in 2019 again, just not like Wii or DS (at least this first few years).

One potential reason I can think of is that due to January being a 5 week month last year, it shifted the tracking periods in November's favor.

2017 tracking periods

Oct 29-Nov 25

Nov 26-Dec 30

2018 tracking periods

Nov 4-Dec 1

Dec 2-Jan 5

So basically Dec 2017 included the last week of Nov which is a big holiday shopping week (includes Cyber Monday) while Dec 2018 lacked that week and instead included the first week of January where sales drop significantly.

If 2018 had the same tracking period as 2017 than I think Nov would have been a bit lower while 2018 a bit higher and is why i guess it makes more sense to compare Nov+Dec.

November + December 2018
NSW - 1356k + 1770k = 3126k (+ 33.9%)
PS4 - 1478k + 820k = 2298k (-13.7%)
XB1 - 1342k + 930k = 2272k (-17.1%)

November + December 2017
NSW - 835k* + 1500k = 2335k
PS4 - 1582k + 1080k = 2662k
XBO - 1376k + 1365k = 2741k

*Data in the thread said between 770k and 900k so I went with the halfway point.

Edit: I'd say this puts in perspective the Smash did little for hardware narrative. Switch had a 33% stronger holiday period thanks to Smash and Pokémon. The reason we get a "disappointing" 14% YoY is because Nintendo slacked off in the other 10 months and the holidays had to make up for it.

yeah...but WHAT IF...?!?!?!

We will never know now.....

It also shows that there still a lot of sales for PS4 in 2019, because if they sold that much at that price, it points to a good year for PS4 in 2019, and depending of price cuts, it could also surprise us again with better numbers than anticipated by most. If there is one console capable of that, is ps4.

Lets say Sony drop the price hard for PS4, 100 dollars per unit, and they got that 20 mil, hell, 21 million. So 3 million more

The result is that PS4 sold mere 2.73% more than it did overall in real life, and they cut off  quite like 2100000000 $

At the end of the day, money talks, BS walks.