I'd say yearly shipments will certainly be over 4 million for the Xbox One with at least half the number being shipped in Q4 alone.
Err, 4M worldwide for all of 2014? That sounds low, even to me. =/
I made this post a while back-
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=135616405&postcount=101
It's quite funny because I made the post saying ~7.35m and then Arstechnica posted exactly what I posted a few days later.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/...th-at-least-65-percent-of-two-console-market/
The quality of Ars has seriously gone downhill since the days of Stokes and Siracusa. Yeah, it's hilarious. /sigh
I have no insight in the AMD/Microsoft situation in particular, but licensing of silicon designs usually is done that way. For the Wii's Hollywood GPU, AMD knew the exact day when the 50 million mark was reached.
http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1306191
Interesting. That certainly sounds like AMD have a fair bit of insight in to what their customers are actually shipping. Maybe they are getting paid for each unit shipped, even if it's just a bonus of sorts. "Half when you build it and half when you actually ship it," or something like that.
Oh, speaking of AMD and pricing, wasn't it mentioned they've now moved in to long term contracts with lower rates? Cheaper APUs and falling prices on GDDR5 make me more confident Sony could hit $299 by the end of the year, even if it brings them back to that "profitable, with the initial sale" state they were in at launch.
As was already pointed out, AMD's <30M statement was made half a month later than Sony's 18.5M announcement. By that time, Sony was likely past 19M. So absolute best case for Microsoft would be 10.9M.
But AMD were talking about year-end numbers, just like Sony. (Technically, Sony's numbers also included the remainder of the then-current business week.)
Excellent, and wow, less than a 10% drop in Q2 2013. 29% in Q3 2013 is a little more in line with what we saw for Q4 2013 and Q1 2014. Sooooo for 2014
maybe figure 30% drops in Q2 and Q3, and we've already figured 40% for Q4?
That'd make their estimated* 2014 XB2 shipments:
Q1 0.8M
Q2 0.7M*
Q3 0.8M*
Q4 2.1M*
Leaving this for XB3:
Q1 1.2M
Q2 0.4M*
Q3 1.6M*
Q4 ????
So that would be 3.2M* Bones shipped Jan-Sep. By comparison, Sony shipped 3.0M PS4s
Jan-Mar. Then another 2.7M, and then another 3.3M. So Sony shipped 9M to Microsoft's 3.2M* in the same period.
That all sound reasonably solid? Even if we bump Q2 and Q3 to 40% drops, that would only add 200k to XB3's total, giving them 3.4M* shipped Jan-Sep.