This graphic is a line graph that is designed to show that Nintendo’s hardware sales have had a negative trend from 1998 to 2006 in both it’s home consoles and its handheld gaming systems. The graph shows that on the home console side, Nintendo had declining to flat sales from 1998 to 2006, with sales never moving past 10 million consoles sold. While sales spiked from 2006 to 2008, sales dropped very quickly afterwards. The graph also shows that while Nintendo had more success in selling handheld systems (consistently sold more than home consoles), even these sales saw a sharp decline from 2009 to 2016. The graph is part of an article that is making the argument that Nintendo’s future in many ways depended on whether or not the sales of its new console (the Switch) could reverse the poor sales trend. The article uses the graph to imply that if the Switch sells poorly, then Nintendo might never be able to reverse the trend.
There are several things that the graph does well. First, it starts the y-axis (sales) at 0, which helps keep it more accurate. Second, the graph is very clear and easy to understand. The two colors are easy to differentiate, and the legend and labels make it easy to understand how many systems were sold in which year. The use of alternating colors for each year also does a nice job at giving the graph a clean look without being too boring to look at. The graph does a good job documenting it’s sources (Nintendo and Statista), and specifies to the audience that its time frame is in fiscal years. Finally, the graph is extremely functional at showing it’s main objective: that Nintendo’s sales have been in decline. Regardless of which audience is looking at the graph, it should be clear to anyone that Nintendo has been in trouble, and that it needs to sell really well really soon.
That being said, there are several things that could improve the graph. First, while the graph does a good job at conveying basic information, it doesn’t do a great job at showing potentially why Nintendo has struggled. Because of this, it is a bit difficult to draw solid conclusions from the graph.
I feel that this graph would benefit by listing important events, such as when Nintendo released different consoles during this period. For example, the graph could somehow, whether on the graph, with dots and a legend, or a timeline below, mention that Nintendo released its GameCube system in 2001 (the period with the flattest home console sales, in part due to increased competition), and released the Wii system in 2006 (which caused the sudden increase and decrease in sales). Adding these events would give the reader a better picture of Nintendo’s struggles. Without knowing any of this, one might be confused as to why Nintendo’s sales have been down, or one might think that Nintendo’s lack of sales is because the company hasn’t released any new systems. The graph could also benefit if it showed the sales trend lines for Nintendo’s competitors, the Playstation and Xbox lines. Without these comparisons, the audience might not get the intended conclusions. For example, Nintendo selling a combined 25 million systems between 2002-2003 might not sound bad on it’s own. However, if we saw that Sony had sold 40 million PlayStation 2’s during the same time period, then the audience would really get a sense of how much trouble Nintendo was at that time. Another thing that might help audiences is if it was mentioned somewhere that handheld systems are less expensive than home console systems. Again, this would help prevent audiences from thinking that Nintendo’s high sales in handheld systems was offsetting Nintendo’s troubles in home console sales.
http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/58790081ee14b6c7148b7fe9-1200/20170113nintendohardware.png
http://www.businessinsider.com/nintendo-console-sales-chart-switch-2017-1