Interesting. I'll definitely give this a follow.

Not sure I understand the Gaps Table, tho. Is it the Switch lead launch aligned? It couldn't be total gaps, but none of the numbers seem to add up either way.

Best way I could explain it is that it is always comparing calendar months.

This is the Switch profile for November, Switch has been out for 3 years & 9 months. For LTD of 70.91m
For Switch that 3 years & 9 months comprises the following:
4 x March, April, May, June, July, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov
3 x Jan, Feb, Dec

Then the gaps table compares that LTD to the other consoles using the same 3 years & 9 months, but it's based on those calendar months, so for DS the LTD is the first 4 March months + first 4 April months etc..... but only the first 3 for Jan, Feb, Dec.

It's not strictly linear time as it's not including DS's 4th Jan/Feb/Dec even though they happened before DS's 4th March.

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After the initial launch period sales follow a predictable pattern over the calendar year so this is a different way of showing how consoles are doing. It's one way of showing the better momentum the Switch has at the moment over the Wii for example, in the normal launch aligned chart as in this article the Switch is still behind the Wii. A little analysis and you can see it is clearly going to pass it in December but this gap table shows it as ahead by 7 million already, in other words if it were to drop to Wii sales levels for the rest of it's life it would still end up ~7 million ahead.

Hi @psychicscubadiver  , I am glad you enjoy it. Let me try and give you some examples to make sure that everything is clear. Thanks @HigHurtenflurst for your explanation. I will use the same DS example:

The Switch was released on March, so each Year begins in march. Year 4 started March 2020 and ends February 2021.

When doing the gap comparison of both consoles, we take all the months that both consoles have a value for. In this table all those months have a color. So as you can see, for the gap chart we are not considering DS January, February or December.

On the table you can see the gap of each year, and the accumulative. The switch had a better year 1, but year 2 and 3 were in favor of the DS. Switch is currently leading year 4, but the DS has some strong months coming up.

The gap chart looks like this:

It has been a wonderful race, the NS had a great lead but the DS started to go fast quick.

Please let me know if this helped you understand the Gap Table, if not, I will gladly give more examples. If you did understand it, I would appreciate if you give me your opinion about it, do you like it?

Thanks

Ah, interesting. I've never seen a gap chart formatted that way before, but it makes sense to consider only equivalent months to get an equivalent gap rather than the peaks and troughs of a launch aligned graph based on two very different launch months.