Ampere Analysis has stated in a recent article by the Financial Times that Nintendo has shifted an estimated 16.4 million units worldwide in 2023. The figure is down eighteen percent year over year…
My guess is that’s either a typo and was supposed to be “shipped”, or that they deliberately chose the word shifted (“to exchange for or replace by another”) in order to combine the numbers of sales and repairs into one statistic so it looks bigger. After Nintendo was mass-sued about the poor quality of their C-sticks, they were ordered to replace / repair any stick drift issues for free even outside of the warranty period, and people naturally used that feature.
I for one had to send my joycons in for repair six times since buying the switch, so in that statistic my hardware would have been sold once, but “shifted” seven times.
It is a common term. I am not sure why it is used. Possibly because the consoles were not sold to end users but shipped to retailers. Some (small portion) is sitting on store shelves.
Why use the word shifted? Seems not the best word. Wouldn’t it be sold?
My guess is that’s either a typo and was supposed to be “shipped”, or that they deliberately chose the word shifted (“to exchange for or replace by another”) in order to combine the numbers of sales and repairs into one statistic so it looks bigger. After Nintendo was mass-sued about the poor quality of their C-sticks, they were ordered to replace / repair any stick drift issues for free even outside of the warranty period, and people naturally used that feature.
I for one had to send my joycons in for repair six times since buying the switch, so in that statistic my hardware would have been sold once, but “shifted” seven times.
It is a common term. I am not sure why it is used. Possibly because the consoles were not sold to end users but shipped to retailers. Some (small portion) is sitting on store shelves.