I'm confused. The Switch sold far more last December than it did during its launch month.
Sorry I wasn't clear, I wasn't talking absolute numbers but for specific months of the year. So I called Switch's launch "historically huge" because it's the highest March number ever. And yes, they sold considerably more than that in December, but
for December that isn't surprising, and they didn't make history. Just PS4 and Xbox One alone have had 3 higher Decembers between them, and there's plenty more from other systems.
PS4 has totaled 6m+ units in its 5 Decembers, and even last year's perceived "$100 price hike" month did over a million. So it seems Switch would need at least 1.9m, and maybe more, to exceed PS4 by 900k in just December, which
donny2112 feels is possible. But the only machines to ever do that much in a December are PS2, Wii, GBA, and DS, and in 2018 Switch has not been selling anywhere near as fast as those in the comparable months. Therefore, I disagree that Switch could beat PS4 by 900k in just December.
However, I also think it won't have to--the gap won't be that big. Therefore, I do think Switch will end up selling more in 2018 than PS4. (But it's not an inevitability.)
I'll restate the discussion in brief so hopefully my impetus is clearer. During the talk about BC games re-appearing in the charts, you indicated that they don't appear on the platform-specific lists for the current system since technically their platform is the previous gen. Which makes sense--that's when the SKU was released, and it isn't re-released. On the other hand, you and
RexNovis suggested that with BC likely being more ubiquitous next gen, it might be helpful to include such titles in the current-gen platform lists too.
I made two arguments against this. First, the fact that only two
Call of Duty games have charted via BC suggests that only the very biggest games will do so (and not necessarily all of them). Coupled with the likelihood that next-gen BC will be complete from day one, rather than adding titles piecemeal and thus concentrating new sales, that'd mean the current-gen platform-specific lists would rarely be changed by the inclusion of BC titles. We'd still get 10 titles per platform, just with one different on some rare occasions. ("Altering [your] methods of presenting the same data we have now.")
Rather, I thought it'd be "truly new and interesting data" if we got both current-gen and previous-gen platform-specific lists instead. I didn't state, but I was imagining, that the indices on the previous-gen lists would not be 1 to 10, but their putative positions if they
were put on the current-gen list. So for example, this month would look something like this for Microsoft:
Xbox One
1. Madden NFL 19
2. Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege
3. Grand Theft Auto V
4. Playerunknown's Battlegrounds
5. Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy
6. Overwatch
7. Naruto To Boruto: Shinobi Striker
8. Far Cry 5
9. Call of Duty: WWII
10. Star Wars: Battlefront II 2017
Xbox 360
2. Madden NFL 19
4. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
29. Grand Theft Auto V
156. NBA 2K18
179. Just Dance 2018
236. FIFA 18
293. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
320. Destiny
338. Call of Duty: Black Ops II
409. LEGO Dimensions
Ok, thanks. Hard to find the dates covered for previous years tracking period. Nice to know that those months are always 5 weeks.
This is pretty standard for retail businesses (which games were until the recent digital revolution), to regularize number of weekends per period and per quarter. NPD uses a "4-4-5" style, so each period has that number of weeks, then the quarter begins again. There's also a "4-5-4" style in common use (I've not worked with any companies using "5-4-4", but it could happen). However, 52 weeks only adds up to 364 days (plus there's leap years), so the exact dates drift against the calendar. Every so often, NPD has to have an extra 5-week period to stop the drift. This January was one such "leap period"; the last one was 2013. I believe they always do them in January, but I'm not sure.
It still has Zelda, Kart, and Odyssey.
And a metric ton of indie releases. Not all of them are doing as well as the signature titles that get noticed by core gamers, but the sheer number of them means Switch has a very extensive library already.
