In recent years we even get statistics like our playtimes, down to the percentage of docked and handheld mode usage, made available to us at the end of the year, so it wouldn't be surprising if they'd know the amount of active players.
There's quite a bit of telemetry baked into the OS. It doesn't matter what the game does as long as Nintendo is willing to provide the data to TPC, which I'm sure they are.
Only if the Switch user has provided an internet connection. AFAIK, the Switch can still be used offline for its whole lifetime, and the required OS updates needed for games are on the cartridges.
That would be most people, and they can estimate the rest. I don't see there being this massive clique of non-connected Switches and even those who are irregularly connected probably do connect occasionally for eshop and data can be exchanged that way.
I thought the same thing but I checked the link in the email a few days later after they sent it because I was curious if they did update or not, and they updated my stats all December long. Mostly just Animal Crossing and Pokemon hours increased because that's what I played mostly in December. Also increased total time playing and docked and handheld hours too.
That's great to hear. Thanks for sharing.
How relevant is that to it only selling because of the name while PLA selling because it's good?
I'm really not so sure about that. There is just things like leveldesign that took a serious turn for the worse over the years, and unless kids from today stop caring about these things when they get older and keep gaming, I don't see your scenario happening. I can name plenty of games I found great as a kid, that I find quite well.. ass today.
I think this would be not as easy/complete as you describe it. Jariw mentions one reason (the Internet connection), and one even bigger issue is that there are a lot of relevant markets where collecting such data is not allowed or an opt-in, and therefore not as easy as in the US, where there are way less restrictions for collecting data of users.
Exactly. Each gen from gen 3 the apparent online consensus (by a loud minority) is that the Pokémon gen would be bad or even terrible. It‘s typically (not necessarily, but mostly) from people of a certain age range (of which not all are unhappy with Pokémon!). Remember how “people“ hated Pokémon Black/White? And now these people are older (some of these simply don‘t buy Pokémon games any more, some re-discover their Pokémon love etc.) — and forums are instead more actively used by a new gen of people who have nostalgia for the Black/White gen.
