Agreed. But we have enough data in order to make an accurate prediction.
You really don't. You're taking an estimate of the first 5-6 weeks of sales in the largest markets, and using it to determine minimum, worldwide sell through over 58 weeks. Sorry, but that's a pretty significant extrapolation.
They're relevant when you have the up to to date data to compare to the older data. (referring to US, UK, FRA, GER)
Except there were huge discounts in the US and UK, and France and Germany were kind of clearing houses for T2 through September. None of which you've taken in to account, incidentally.
But then you can't say that you think sell through is X like you did before. If there are too many variables then you simply step back and say you can't come to a decison. Instead you came to a decision based on the numbers we have, except you didn't believe MS could sell that many. That's not exactly proving anything is it?
I never said it was X. I said 3M seemed high, and that it was only an estimate to begin with so it shouldn't be taken as infallible.
Because channel is different. That's looking at the shipped number vs the sold through number. Microsoft combined shipments for Q2-Q4 so it's impossible to say that Microsoft must have shipped X amount. We can estimate a certain number, but we can't say 100% that this number must be the exact number.
Well, right. That's how estimates work. Just not if you or MS are the ones doing the estimating, apparently.
If PS4 has 1m in the channel, we cannot say Xbox One will have more, we cannot say Xbox One will have less. It's impossible to put a figure on X1 channel units as we don't know what Xbox One shipped. We can put a figure on PS4 though.
We can certainly estimate XB3 channel volume though, in much the same way you've estimated their sell through.
It's pointless trying to consider this. And same goes to the poster above who did the whole 3/4 calculation as you pointed out.
It's no more pointless than considering your own estimations, apart from the fact you assume yourself and MS to be largely infallible. Sorry to sound like a dick, but you're being incredibly egotistical and condescending.
When I say hard to believe, I mean "surprising", "unexpected". Not "omg that can't be true, Microsoft must be lying to us".
When I say something is hard to believe, I mean that it's hard to believe, but I don't have enough information to say either way. Other times I can't be sure of something, but it can be comparatively easy to believe. For example, Sony's channel was surprisingly thin coming out of 2013, and I don't know if 4.2M sold through was a perfectly accurate estimate, but it's not hard to believe, because they were reported to be airlifting a lot of shipments throughout the holidays to attempt to meet demand.
Look at my Blackberry in the UK example.
Actually, I was gonna talk about one of your phone examples. One company told you they'd sold 1200 phones by lunchtime or whatever. Obviously, they didn't get that from NPD, but every time a phone is activated, it calls the mothership, so they know 1200 activations is 1200 sales. But, only 80% of new phones are actually activated on the spot, with the rest being activated 12+ hours later. So when they had 1200 activations, that would mean it was likely 1500 phones had been sold at that point. So were they lying when they said 1200, or was it a bad estimate on their part? Maybe they know about the 80% thing and took that in to account, so when they told you 1200 sales, it was because they'd had 960 activations. So no, they don't
know they sold 1200 phones, but it's a perfectly accurate estimate, made in good faith, so there's no reason to question it, right? Well, since that phone was the new hotness, maybe people couldn't wait to start playing with it especially the people who showed up before lunch and so they had 93% on-the-spot activation that morning. So the 960 activations only represented 1032 sales instead of the estimated 1200. Were they lying, or did they have terrible methodology? Or was their methodology sound, but the launch simply didn't play out as they had predicted? There are all sorts of ways estimates can turn out wrong. Yes, even the estimates you make.
Yes, it's an estimate, but it's an estimate based on actual data and is an estimate that has been calculated to work out an absolute minimum.
It's a big estimate based on a tiny estimate that was made a long time ago. Not a lot of room for certainty and absolute minimums there.
Well they could include sell through if they want in their financials, but they recognize revenue on shipments. Hence why they post shipped figures.
I was under the impression that anything in the financials was subject to verification by the SEC, and they're not interested in estimates. That's why they only show shipments, because that's the only number they can be sure of, and tell the SEC, "Look, we booked the revenue here, shipped the product here, and the customer took delivery here." The SEC don't want to hear, "Plus probably 600k in T1.5," so those numbers don't go in to the financials, because there's no way to back them up.
Press releases can get them in trouble if very misleading, but at the end of the day those sell through figures don't contribute to the financials as they recognize revenue on shipped figures, if it sells to a user after that it doesn't matter. (well it does but not in their financials)
Okay, and just how bad does their estimate need to be before it's legally considered "very misleading"? What is the allowed level of incompetence? To go back to our phone example above, would overestimating their actual sell through by roughly 20% be legally actionable, or could they reasonably claim their "80% activated" methodology was sound, if not accurate in this particular case? What if they had been off by less than 10%?
Sell through is always estimated. You're never going to get a 100% accurate sell through number when you're talking about millions and millions of product through hundreds of thousands of retailers.
Again, sorta my point all along. The 3M figure was always nothing more than an estimate, and was never claimed to be a tally by anyone apart from you. You've taken this estimate of sales over a roughly 5-week period, and used it to somehow guarantee minimum sell-though over a period of nearly 60 weeks.
I get it. But you really can't just call out Microsoft and not include Sony or Nintendo. And we can't say company A is more likely to over estimate and company B is more likely to underestimate.
If we don't assume Allan and Bob to be equally competent and forthright, why would we assume Acme and BobCorp to be so?
We can account for 8.7m units. But it doesn't stop us using that very high number in order to come to a minimum sell through.
It might, if you're using a small, and possibly inaccurate sample to extrapolate the difference over an extended period of time.
If you're talking about German retailers and such then you have to take both that and the overall data into account. We know that sales in Germany were 100k in CY2013 and 170k for 11 months in CY2014. We can still see that sales were ok in CY2014 and likely are over 200k when you factor in month 12. Yet we still see reports of Xbox One not selling out in Germany.
The issue isn't that it's not selling, the issue is that they have too much stock. Whilst 200k is a low number, it's not zero. The Xbox One still sells in Germany but it's likely that MS have been over shipping to the German market. Simple supply and demand.
Err, I've kinda been the one arguing for a more comprehensive look at the situation here, you know.
Also, I never claimed their sales were zero. What I've been talking about all along is the fact they're over-shipped, which you acknowledge, but steadfastly refuse to discuss or even consider.
We know there is a likelihood MS over shipped, and it's something that I agree with. But we don't know how much they over shipped and what that means for channel. The Xbox One is available in a lot less markets than the PS4 so we could even see the Xbox One with lower number of units unsold.
I propose we refer to those additional markets as T3 for now. But yes, that's a good point. What do you suppose Sony's channel volume is for T3? 100k? 200k? Impossible to say, so we should just forget all about it and go back to multiplying Microsoft's Week Six Sales Estimate out to Week Fifty-Eight?
Well, I can't really argue against you on the dis-kinect thing (and there is no way to know what would have happened if they didn't unbundle), but I think that sales would have collapsed had they not made that move, and I think it took a while for the news to reach the broader consumer base that the X1 was cheaper.
Perhaps. I hadn't really considered that. Really though, even in the US, sales were pretty poor following the initial launch rush, which actually seemed to die out even before Christmas. Nothing they did really moved the needle all that much until the holidays, with all of the bundling on top of hardware discounts as much as 30% at times.
Now I think your idea that the PS4 will drop to $299 is quite unlikely. While Sony could do that, they would be cutting a lot of profit, and if you think about it, the US and UK are the only regions where they need to be price competitive....PS4 could outsell X1 in Europe 2-1 easily this year if Sony decided to stick to 399.
I think they may drop the price $50 (if they drop it at all), though they can probably get by at $400 with a few aggressive bundles.
I seriously don't understand why you guys think Sony won't move on price until their sales tank and/or MS start catching up. Do you really not remember the PS1 and PS2? Sony reduce their production costs because it's a good thing to do, and then they reduce their retail price because
they'll sell more hardware and thereby earn more money selling games. It has nothing to do with anything Microsoft or Nintendo are doing. It's about growing their own ecosystem as efficiently as possible. That's the mindset. Consumer psychology plays a big part in the strategy though. They could launch at $400 and drop the price $1/week, but that just tells people the longer they wait, the better off they are. As consumers, we all realize this, but there's no sense in constantly reminding us. So rather than drop the price a buck a week, they wait two years and drop the price $100 all at once. That allows them to milk the early adopters a bit more, and creates massive buzz in the broader market when the big price cut finally hits. And yeah, this fall we'll be two years out from launch, and all indications are Sony's box is getting significantly cheaper to build, so there's really no reason to
not expect a significant cut. Sony have every reason to cut the price just as much as they can afford, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if they could afford $100 two years out from launch.
My prediction for this year is
PS4: More than 37 million cumulative units sold in
XB1: More than 21 million cumulative units sold in
WiU: More than 13 million cumulative units sold in
Again, you seem to be ignoring the issue of over-shipment, even though you acknowledge it yourself. If we're figuring MS at ~7.8M shipped for the year, and we go with your 10M sold through, that means they out-shipped demand by about 800k. Those 800k are still sitting in the channel, waiting to be sold, before more orders are placed. But you're calling for shipments to be over 9M in 2015. To hit that, demand would need to cover the 800k excess already in the channel, plus 9M additional units. Demand for 9.8M units in 2015 would be a 40% increase in demand over the 7M estimated sold in 2014, and most of those were sold on the backs of significant price cuts.
On the other hand, you have demand for PS4 running about 17.5M in 2015, only a 22% increase over their 2014 demand of 14.3M. What causes XB3 demand to increase so dramatically while PS4 demand stalls by comparison? Do you understand why people would look at your XB3 prediction as optimistic, while your PS4 prediction seems pessimistic by comparison?
Same applies to sell through, I've done the math again, at a very minimum we can say say that the Xbox One has sold through more than 9 million units to customers. Now obviously you've all seen my post where I estimate 10 million as a minimum sell through. But if anyone says that sell through is 9m or less then they are 100% wrong as we can prove 9m through official data.
I could've sworn it was 8.7M when I went to bed
If you want to say I'm wrong or that I'm "estimating" too high then I at least expect a post explaining why I am.
I thought it was "pointless to consider" anything which might indicate your projection may be off. You've started shouting down potential rebuttals before they've even been fully formulated. May we only rebut you with the data and methodology you provide? We're only here to check your math?
If all you can say is "It's too high because the Xbox One can't be doing that well", then that's not exactly a valid reason at all
I think the same can be said about, "XBone is doing well because it was estimated to be doing well for a few weeks more than a year ago."
Just FYI, after CY2015 I expect the Xbox One to drop in sales quite a lot. Funny how none of you guys take into consideration that my prediction model says that.
When do you predict their sales will peak, and why?
I could be wrong, but I think he was suggesting below 10 million for sold through and I agree with him on that. However, neither sides could reach an agreement and it went on and on until the thread died for a short while. And I see the war is starting again...
Mostly, I was just saying it was
possible it was less than 10M. Could be more than 10M. It's really hard for me to get an idea of how much MS have in the channel until I know how much Sony have. Zhuge maintains it's impossible to have any idea whatsoever how much stock MS are sitting on, although he maintains that
he knows it's less than 2M units, and probably a lot less, regardless of any and all other indicators.
I think that the best situation for the consumers would be if all three platforms were equally healthy.
Yuck. That just leads to higher development costs, and fewer games being produced at lower quality. Competition doesn't mean compulsory multi-platform support. It means any and all companies being free to compete solely on merit, and letting consumers decide which is the best choice. There's nothing wrong with consumers actually making that decision and choosing a winner. On the contrary, as I said, in situations like this, making the choice will likely lead to better games produced at lower cost, and more of them.
