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NPD Sales Results for November 2015 [Up3: Combined Hardware For PS4 + XB1 + Wii U]
- Thread starter Nirolak
- Start date
Narpas Sword0
Member
No other manufacturer has had 4 successful products?
PS1 sold about as well as Wii, PS2 sold about as well as DS, PSP and PS3 both outsold the NES, and the GB accrued its sales over 13 years and 4 revisions. Sony has 4 megahits under its belt, with the PS4 looking to be another and the Vita being the only device with less than 80M sales. Nintendo has NES, SNES, N64, VB, WiiU, and 3DS missing 80M sales, in some cases substantially so.
PS3 is not a history of success from Sony.
Nintendo revisionist history is my favourite reading material.
mejin
Member
They sucessfully fixed the trainwreck. lol
It took a long time but you can say PS3 is their least sucessfull playstation console, it's not wrong.
Coulomb_Barrier
Member
I think US is at least 65% of XB1's total market. So 15m sold in WW. PS4 has more than double total install base, gonna be at 36m or so by end of the year.
Narpas Sword0
Member
And yet it outsold the majority of Nintendo hardware that is supposedly untouchable in sales.
By Sony's standards, it's not.
But PS3 sold more than every SEGA, XBOX and Nintendo home console except for Wii.
No, but I bet any other company would love to be seen as a failure at selling 80 million units.
The important thing is that Sony was able to build from it while Nintendo is scratching their head at where their Wii userbase went.
Aceofspades
Banned
Microsoft now wishes to sell as much as PS3, and it will be considered huge success for them, funny when you think about it.
I don't know if we can use the word successful for PS3. Surely it sold an impressive amount of units but it's a system that made Sony bleed billions of dollars early in the cycle and represented a significant lost of market share.
This doesn't sounds a lower success but a failure.
Cost Sony billions lol
It's not about how much you sell but how much profit the product generates.
Xbox One will not sell more than 80 million units but is likely that will be more profitable than PS3.
Outside of the start of this gen, Nintendo has always had solid profits.. I know people like to focus on the 8-/16-bit eras of dominance, the Wii comeback, handheld dominance, and that console warriors (myself included) love a good power struggle and/or slaughter. But really... If a company is operating in the black, loves and believes in what they are doing and gets (back) to a place of revenue growth, what more matters?
1-2 years ago I was worried about Nintendo. Operating in the red over quarters or more starts to make things scary. But now that they are profitable again, and with an amazing software year like 2015... If repeating 2015 on a new system is "the best we have to look forward to"? Yeah I'm good with that.
Highly unlikely... No, impossible. The XBONE was only slightly less costly than PS3 at launch (loss). And PS3 hardware became profitable pretty quickly on top of the system and software outselling 360 worldwide also from early on. XBONE in fact has all of that working against it. Hardware still isn't profitable thanks to having to slash the price over the first two years, and total software sales are behind PS3 at the same point (bad) while hardware sales are around the same, but at a higher loss now than when Sony released the first revision (no EE chip).
No way XBONE is as profitable as PS3. Impossible. More so than Xbox. And probably Wii U given Nintnedo's early losses during the early years.
In a vacuum without context, 80 million sounds mighty impressive but lets not pretend Sony didnt have to sink a crapload of money to get those sales.
Narpas Sword0
Member
The statement being respond to was "Nintendo is untouchable because they have 4 successful products, unlike anyone else."
Sony's 4th most successful product is more successful than nearly all Nintendo products. The fact that it can be called a failure is a testament to Sony's consistent success in video games.
If we want to move the goalposts of the discussion to profitability, well, Nintendo has sunk a lot of profits into Wii U and it sure isn't getting 80M sales in reward.
I think speculating on the US market share is a bit pointless.
Consider the top 5 console markets:
US - 9.7M (as of right now)
UK - maybe 2M?
Germany - 378k (as of March 15)
France - 416k (through 2014)
Japan - 60k (as of right now)
So that's around 12.5M. Another 3.5M seems rather unlikely.
At this rate, 45 mil. is max.
You are measuring success based on unit sales. This doesn't t take into account other factors and not relativize the market size at different times.
There's no sense in put PS3 80m+ ahead of NES 60m+ as a measure of success.
I think it's more thanks to time than money, Sony was able to scrape it back and start making money in the latter half of that generation because of how long the generation went on for.
You should have a look at the Nintendo patent threads. One Nintendo patent is about having some users buy extra computing power hardware addons that Nintendo can use for cloud processing in exchange for Nintendo credits, think folding at home X bitcoin. The other is about an oval controller where the whole top is a single touch screen, including the bits around the dual analog sticks and real buttons with haptic feedback for virtual buttons.
My prediction is something between 40m-50m.
Narpas Sword0
Member
Wasn't my idea. The guy said Nintendo was the only company with 4 successes. It was in response to someone pointing out that Nintendo home hardware has been in decline since the NES. I can only assume he is including the NES as one of the 4 successes. I was giving him Game Boy also even though that has some big asterisks on it too.
The point is Nintendo isn't the only company capable of 4 blockbuster platforms. And Sony is working on a 5th, Nintendo isn't.
KillerMan91
Member
That is the problem. How they can get back to the revenue growth next gen. I mean of course never say never as Wii and DS showed but they are in tough spot. Handheld business is dying in west and they are completely irrelevant in home console market. They can't generate profits forever if their hw and sw sales continue to drop next gen with ever raising development costs for said software. When you look this past gen as a whole does the recent profits even offset the losses earlier this gen? I mean even Sony saw some profits during latter half of the PS3 gen but still as a whole the gen lost them money.
Made them money in the end. (Re)Created mindshare going into this gen. Among many of the highest rated games of the gen. I mean you surely understand that their are varying degrees of success. On the other hand failure largely means "lost" or "did not succeed" in which cases Sony did not achieve those in many (most?) areas.
It all comes down to what metrics you use.. But outside of PS2 dominance, pretty near impossible to categorize PS3 as a failure. I mean XBONE is more of a "failure" than PS3, and in its current state I wouldn't even call that a failure. Wii U is close, but still (now) profitable and has some of the best exclusives on the market.
MatrixMan.EXE
Member
The way they blew up certainly was. Fact is, they were innovative but weren't able to retain an audience beyond one cycle. So they were either fads, or Nintendo striking lucky. Maybe a bit of both. Take your pick. Nintendo certainly weren't prepared for the long term with the Wii, that's for sure.
I'm talking specifically about home consoles. Not denying the success of their handheld business at all. But my point is that after their success with their first home console, their marketshare in the space has steadily declined with each cycle. The outlier being the Wii. Wii U is a return to normal, so to speak. The data supports it.
Dash_Riprock
Member
At the rate its going selling anywhere near 40 million, let alone 45, will be nothing short of a miracle. Xbox One is not the PS3, it does not have Europe or Asia to fall back on.
If profit is the only measure of success then the entire Xbox brand has been an utter failure. Obviously MS would disagree, and they would be right.
We know that? PS3 became profitable, but erased all the loss?
And how Xbox One is more a failure than PS3? It's supposedly doing better than Xbox 360 and as far as I know isn't bleeding billions.
Well, profit is more important than unit sales, that's for sure. And you have information that Xbox 360 business wasn't profitable for Microsoft?
if xbox one sales half of 360, imo thats a failure. If its 60-70 not bad.
Xbox 360 had a late bump (Kinect) that isn't on the horizon from Xbox One, so the competition is almost unfair.
mejin
Member
Well, some other people already post some insight I share with.
You can't really say PS3 is a failure and XB1 is doing ok. It doesn't make sense. Microsoft also bled money on XB1, Kinect was a disaster and can we say One is already profitable? All the mind share XB1 lost.
If we take the numbers you post 60% on US and 10% UK, there's only 30% for all the rest of the world. XB1 is a huge step back from 360 as much as PS3 was from PS2. But Sony learned a lot from PS3 and we still don't know if Microsoft has the ability to do the same for XB1. Brand is damaged as fuck.
unapersson
Member
Erasing past losses doesn't matter, those are sunk costs and have already been accounted for. Making a profit in the present and future is more important.
UK apparently is more than 2 million.
Honestly I don't have knowledge of worldwide market to measure if is likely or not. I remember when Microsoft announced 3 million at the end of 2013, people was doing math with public data and finding too high.
KillerMan91
Member
You don't make a product with the idea that maybe someday it makes some money back. You make products with the idea that as a overall project it makes money. As a whole PS3 lost billions and was financially a failure. You could say it paved way to the now succesful PS4 but they could have done that without losing billions in the process with better designed product than PS3.
Microsoft bled money on Xbox One, but I don't think is anything close to PS3 first two years, we saw the disaster on Sony's earnings releases. OK fits well for Xbox One right now. It's not doing really good, but isn't doing bad either if in fact is the fastest selling Xbox system.
I'm not arguing that sell half of PS4 is not a disappointment because of course it is, but PS3 situation was objectively much worse.
In business there is no such thing as erasing losses over time. A loss last FQ or FY is done. Gone. The goal is always to grow the next FQ or FY. Even if Sony made more profit now than it lost then, they can never "erase" those losses.
And while many warriors cling to XBONE cumulative totals, monthly/weekly sales are behind both 360 and PS3, aside from launch sales, and fairly anomalous holiday sales in the US. That should change around next month when worldwide totals fall behind 360 at its same period, and later next year when US totals fall behind 360 and worldwide totals fall behind PS3 at those same point.
And despite those facts, I never even said XBONE was a failure, because it's not. That was exactly my point. There are varying degrees of success, and you can point to many of those in relation to both XBONE and Wii U. Sure you can point to many, many, many, many more of them on PS4, but on their own merits that doesn't matter much.
The only reason we haven't seen XBONE on MS' earnings is because of the way MS reports them. We do know from many industry sources that MS was losing a bit of money per system at launch. And while maybe not as much as PS3, Sony had their first hardware revision a year later, meanwhile MS is on the same hardware revision and effectively $100-300 cheaper depending on how you slice it (Kinect, bundles, etc)
And in a vacuum, without context, the PS3 didn't help Sony create and push the new de facto standard of physical support for both movies and videogames, allowing for the next gen to continue seeing retail releases fitting on one disc and having high resolution textures.
It was expensive for Sony, sure, but it is paying off dividends to this day and for the foreseeable future.
Now Cell ... that's another story.
panda-zebra
Banned
And on microsoft's everything is munged together and difficult to quantify. Therefore, guessing.
unapersson
Member
Of course you don't but if you've got a product that's losing you lots of money you work on making it profitable as soon as possible so it's not a drag on your business in the future. You don't dwell on how much it cost you last year. Especially if it's just one of your business units.
That's why you might drop a product like a stone if you can't see a way to make it profitable, sometimes it's easier to take the hit rather than trying to spend your way out of a hole. See Sega with the Dreamcast.
I know that, you absorbs the losses and move on, but if we want to put in perspective if a product was profitable or not, we need necessarily to look at the total. Doing this isn't clear for me that PS3 made money for Sony in general.
No but according to the old data that we have, when Xbox One was at ~1.6m, is virtually impossible to be below 2 million right now.
panda-zebra
Banned
Lord MAU scoffs at your quest for units sold.
Haven't been in this thread and just saw your reply.
Including Digital and Bundles October was 1.3 million, it had a 30% digital. Add the 358k to that and you're at 1.65 million without bundles or digital for November. Like I said close to 2 million, not at 2 million.
Just pure retail though yes its 1.3 or so.
Stone Ocean
Member
Yeah, if the Xbox is at around 13 million at this rate it should stop at 25-30 million tops
Out of Wii U territory, into Gamecube territory lol
Kenzodielocke
Banned
Last generation the ratio was something like 2:1 for 360, right?