Who is winning the console race?

Judging by the sales figures for game consoles in the US over the past three months, you could say that the console war is at its peak. Namely, in November last year Xbox Series S was best sold, in December Nintendo Switch, and January this year PlayStation 5. But do these sales figures really reflect the popularity of individual consoles?

Not really. During these months, sales depended to the greatest extent on the supply of electronic circuits. The crisis in consumer supply chains, affecting everything from the furniture and automotive industries to gaming consoles, began in mid-2020 when the pandemic caused a spike in demand that manufacturers couldn't keep up with due to increased work and homeschooling. And apparently they still can't, because they still can't keep up with demand.

That is why it is almost impossible to assess the state of the gaming console market at the moment, as it changes from week to week. When a manufacturer manages to obtain a larger quantity of the necessary circuits, the number of its consoles on the market increases and sales increase. "Market shares fluctuate significantly from week to week and from month to month, which is entirely due to the console offering," Mat Piscatella, CEO of the NPD Group, told Insider. “We don't know what the real demand is for each console, nor do we know what the hardware market is like. Sales curves are currently not normalized due to these supply issues.'

And when will the problems end? No one knows how to properly assess this either. It is true that pandemics could hopefully slowly fade away, which could lead to a certain calming of the situation, but we do not know how permanent the changes in the way of work brought about by the pandemic will be. In any case, more people will be working from home than before, and no one knows exactly how this will affect supply chains.

Source: Insider

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