But isn't the switch tracking slightly behind its first year? I know the lion share of sales is during the holidays but I still think it will end obout on par with last year...which is still a awesome number btw...
As others have pointed out even if it's lagging behind that's mainly attributed to Splatoon 2, it's by far the biggest Switch game and still a major hardware seller. You gotta remember that Splatoon 2 was the top selling game in July, August and September on the Switch - with an attach rate
>50% during those months.
This year we had Octopath which Square didn't even ship
200K for and faced major shortages as the biggest game during the Obon Festival. Simply put Nintendo and 3rd Parties didn't provide anything that could compete with what we saw last year aka Splatoon 2 on the Switch and DQXI on the 3DS/PS4 - so July/August were down across the board. Things will change during September and October:
Code:
Switch HW Sales(Sep 3 - Oct 28, 2017):
Week 36 - 45.439(-9%)
Week 37 - 44.052(-3%)
Week 38 - 43.426(-1%)
Week 39 - 73.231(+69%)
Week 40 - 38.204(-48%)
Week 41 - 40.803(+7%)
Week 42 - 31.092(-24%)
Week 43 - 126.701(+308%)
TOTAL: 442.948
Av. per Week: 55.368
Top 5 Games(Sep 3 - Oct 28, 2017):
1) Super Mario Odyssey
- 462.038
2) Splatoon 2 -
214.951
3) Pokken Tournament DX -
106.947
4) Mario Kart 8 Deluxe -
99.845
5) Fire Emblem Warriors -
53.531
Just looking ahead in September and October you basically had
Super Mario Odyssey and
Pokken as the only two games that broke
100K sales.
FIFA 18 &
DBX2 eventually surpassed
100K but it took them months to do so. In comparison this year you have a much more varied line-up during the same period even without a blockbuster title like Super Mario Odyssey launching, so I think that Switch wont fall below 40K at any time during the next 7 weeks, while I can see Nintendo having big weeks in store to end the quarter week with
Dragon Ball FighterZ,
Musou Orochi 3,
Valkyria Chronicles 4 &
FIFA 19 all launching. Than in the following week you have
Super Mario Party which is going to end up
>1M in Japan in it's lifetime and finally
Dark Souls Remastered launches two weeks after. So even without matching Week 43 I think that Switch will be flat or slightly up during the same period which leads into
Pokemon Lets Go,
Smash,
Yo-Kai Watch 4,
Dragon Quest Builders 2,
NSMB Deluxe and probably a bunch of other games before the end of March.
Once again I will repeat last year outside of Super Mario Odyssey & Kirby, there is not a single game that launched between October and March that ended up selling
>500K, this year I'm seeing at least
5 games that might hit
1M lifetime, 3 of which could potentially hit
2M lifetime. There is no way to have such a stacked line-up and not see significant gains in hardware sales.
