All purpose sales and sales rumors/anecdotes thread next gen+

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For example, how do you parse if one hardware is #5, and the other has two SKU's, one #10 and one #15? Which one is supposed to win that months NPD?
There's no way of knowing. Amazon's rankings don't relate statistically to NPD's numbers. They're only useful to gauge interest and trends. eg. If over six months PS4 HW is in the top ten and XB1 hardware is in the top 50, that signifies PS4 having more interest than XB1 which would tend towards greater sales. However, a console being at position #5 and another at position #10 at one time slice throughout the month does not signify a 2:1 sales ratio.

If someone performed an intensive statistical analysis, the correlation between Amazon rankings and NPD (and thus, worldwide using regional Amazons) sales could probably be determined with some accuracy. The important thing is whether this correlation exists or not. If it does, then even without a defining formula we can use Amazon to get a 'gut feeling' for market performance.

And again nobody can explain that PSP was 2nd best selling hardware SKU of 2012 on Amazon. But nowhere near that anywhere else.
My guess would be PSP owners favoured Amazon as a source for price and availability. PSP isn't quite the same thing as a console and appeals to a different demographic by and large which, in my estimation, would be more inclined to shop online.

AND, I'm not arguing against using Amazon as a source either. It's fun, very quickly updated, etc. We just need to understand it's limits.
This!

...because you are drawing conclusions from the number and stats you yourself seem to keep an eye out and look for signs? As has been pointed out before; the only way to get any fair idea out of the Amazon sales is by looking at the rankings. If a product is sitting on #8 and another #44, it doesn't mean that the latter is selling over 5 times worse.

For all we know, rank #8 and #44 could be seperated by a ratio of less than 2-1.
This!
 
I wonder if we went back in time and looked at 360 v PS3 months how that would work out? (perhaps I will do just that when I get time)

If you had the time, I think that’d be a very worthwhile exercise.

Rangers said:
And we haven't even touched on the multiple SKU part of it, which seems to be trotted out as a convenient excuse when needed to explain some anomaly, but in the last few posts suddenly isn't mentioned. For example, how do you parse if one hardware is #5, and the other has two SKU's, one #10 and one #15? Which one is supposed to win that months NPD?

I think we need to look at the hardware alone and ignore all of the games/pads, etc. Currently Amazon places SKUs of PS4 at #1 and #2 and the Xbox One at #3 and #4, this essentially means that the PS4 continues to sell more hardware, because their sales are higher for both SKUs. If we had a situation where PS4 was at #1 and #3 with the Xbox One at #2 and #4, we wouldn’t know which had sold more (only that it’s probable the PS4 sold more). Besides, the difference between #1 and even #40 might only be 10k sales difference, we simply don’t know until we have the actual numbers.

Rangers said:
And again nobody can explain that PSP was 2nd best selling hardware SKU of 2012 on Amazon. But nowhere near that anywhere else. From memory the PSP was also quite popular on Amazon in other recent years, not just 2012.

I think I covered this a few posts back (at least I wrote something that I meant to post). I googled PSP sales in 2012 and it turns out that it sold at a ratio of 2:1 compared to the PSV during the time the PSV was available. Also, the Xbox 360 had many different SKUs and was probably placed multiple times on the list of sales from Amazon. Just because one PSP was placed first doesn’t mean that it sold more than the Xbox 360 at this particular retailer. So this shows that the Amazon data are valid for showing trends, if we simple ignored the PSP we wouldn’t think to check whether its sale were actually that good and apparently they were good.

Rangers said:
My issue recently is we see PS4 VASTLY ahead at Amazon since launch, and yet we dont see the 3 or 4-1 discrepancy it would seem to indicate in NPD, typically. When one console is ranked 5-10, and the other 30-40, that's a huge difference and suggest to me something selling 3-10X better. The NPD numbers haven't shown that.

Again, we don’t know the exact number so we can only guess at what the figures mean. Like I said earlier the difference between being positioned at #40 might only put it 10k sales behind the PS4 – which is a pretty good result. Also, I believe the Xbox One has more than just the Kinectless bundle and the Titanfall one – so it’s quite possible when you combine their multiple SKUs that they’re extremely close to the PS4. We just don’t know without the numbers.

Rangers said:
June could be interesting test case, I'd think XO would have at least a chance to win June

It definitely will be an interesting test case – so far Amazon has shown that the PS4 continues to sell very well. We also mustn’t ignore the white/game bundle, that is placed very high and the data suggests that it’s more popular than a Kinectless Xbox One. We need to look at how they all stand later in the month when the Kinectless Xbox has been available for a while longer.
 
Thinking about it, will the white PS4 count towards sales until it's released? I'm not sure. If they don't count then there's a good chance Xbox One has better June sales.
 
Thinking about it, will the white PS4 count towards sales until it's released? I'm not sure. If they don't count then there's a good chance Xbox One has better June sales.

That was my point - why the XBO could have outsold the PS4 even though PS4 was tracking better than XBO - because they were selling 'pre-orders' of stock they didn't have (supply constrained).

However PS4 could still be ahead (9th vs 46th + 54th) it all depends what that gap actually means (and whether the PS4 has other bundles not listed that pick up the slack.

The point is, you might have expected the kinectless sku to bump up near the PS4 near/straight after E3, but it hasn't...it seems (massive assumption) the demand < price point for XBO.
 
Thinking about it, will the white PS4 count towards sales until it's released? I'm not sure. If they don't count then there's a good chance Xbox One has better June sales.
Pre-orders don't count as sales until released, but they contribute to amazon's rankings.

Still, I think the PS4 will comfortably win June. It's ranking higher at 4 out of the top 5 retailers NPD tracks as I pointed out earlier. The only one missing is Target because they don't do any sort of sales rankings.

Remember that rankings are just rankings.. we don't know the actual numbers. For all we know, the PS4 could be selling better than last month.

During E3, a lot of announcements are made, so a lot of software gets temporary bumps as people pre-order. High profile software always sells more than hardware. Plus Mario Kart seems to be selling well. Also PS+ is on sale right now which shot it up to 4th.

Another indication that PS4 sales remain high, is the fact that PS cards remain in the top 10 alongside the PS4. XB cards are ranked lower, near the XB1.
 
Okay sorry I misinterpreted the amazon data from december. There is a 100% console winning NPD accuracy (n=7) so I'll agree that we can use amazon as a sale metric for the NPD
 
Sony just announced some ownership figures. It seems that 17% of PS4 owners did not own any last gen console and that 31% owned either a XB360 or a Wii but not a PS3. So that is 48% of the current ownership that will be entirely, or relatively, new to Sony games like the Last Of Us etc. You can see why they are so keen on remaking the PS3 classics on the the PS4. They will be new games to nearly half of their market.
 
So Amazon sales rankings accurately predicted NPD results 5 out of 6 times since launch. Seems like a fairly reliable predictor, to me. Especially when the Amazon rankings were much closer in December, the stock situation was so volatile at the time and the sales gulf was relatively narrow.

With the PS4's sales rank reliably 25-40 places above the Xbox One on Amazon I'd say it is almost certain it is being outsold across the whole market as well.

Based on what? You compare the highest Xbox SKU to the highest PS4 SKU and declare the one that is ranked higher as the one that will win NPD? That's terribly simplistic, it ignores multiple SKU's, but lets define our terms...

Also I thought it was 6/6? It missed a month?

I wouldn't strictly predict XOne would outsell PS4 for June, but it might, and I bet it will be at least 75% of PS4's sales, which the Amazon hardware rankings dont really reflect imo.

Thinking about it, will the white PS4 count towards sales until it's released? I'm not sure. If they don't count then there's a good chance Xbox One has better June sales.

I think it does at Amazon IIRC, but not at NPD.

I think you can go back to June 2013 charts at Amazon and PS4 is there. Proving Amazon counts preorders as sales at the time of the preorder. Well, I guess thinking of it it's kinda obvious, since preorders are on the hourly chart to begin with.

But I still dont see why you'd think PS4 at #9 and two X One SKU's at say 45 and 55 means X1 sells better. First off there's no way to tell, second intuitively I think one #10 spot should be selling well above two charts spots below 40 in sales.

Basically as I point out you guys are all over the place :p And I know we're going to get lots of backtracking and excusing with multi-SKU's the first time it doesn't work out, which there's a good chance will be June imo.

I will say as of this second Kinectless X1 is at #43 I think and Titanfall bundle is #55. Basically it seems Kinectless X1 may be ahead to stay, which wasn't obvious.

Another indication that PS4 sales remain high, is the fact that PS cards remain in the top 10 alongside the PS4. XB cards are ranked lower, near the XB1.

Or this could be an indication what I've argued, more Playstation shoppers shop at Amazon...

Actually once I read this may have something to do with buying PSN cards on Amazon is a good deal for international shoppers (I forget why). So from what I understand you have lots of people from Europe buying PS cards off Amazon USA, accounting for their constant high ranking. Now this should apply to Xbox cards as well I suppose, but Xbox has less international users. Anyway, the whole charts are unusually strong for Playstation so I doubt any explanation is needed.

Still, I think the PS4 will comfortably win June. It's ranking higher at 4 out of the top 5 retailers NPD tracks as I pointed out earlier

These are online site only rankings though. Brick and mortar is a whole nother, much larger story. And I'm pretty certain lets say, Gamestop's sales ranking only account for online orders at Gamestop.com (which in their case is probably a very tiny fraction), not the sales at their thousands of local stores. Same for all online arms of brick and mortar retailers.
I think I covered this a few posts back (at least I wrote something that I meant to post). I googled PSP sales in 2012 and it turns out that it sold at a ratio of 2:1 compared to the PSV during the time the PSV was available. Also, the Xbox 360 had many different SKUs and was probably placed multiple times on the list of sales from Amazon. Just because one PSP was placed first doesn’t mean that it sold more than the Xbox 360 at this particular retailer. So this shows that the Amazon data are valid for showing trends, if we simple ignored the PSP we wouldn’t think to check whether its sale were actually that good and apparently they were good.

I dont see why 2:1 sales over extremely poor selling Vita matters? PSP ranked ahead of for example, all 360 SKU at Amazon in 2012...that's nowhere near showing up in NPD which was my point.

PSP was 99 bucks I think at Amazon for like, 2011, 2012, 2013, and was apparently pretty popular there, even as in the real world it was basically dead/dying in that time. And why not, you could see the appeal. Heck I imagine it may not have even been all that available on the street, pushing Amazon sales further higher.

Come to think of it, you seem to also see a lot of very niche, Japanesy games overrepresented at Amazon altogether. Which also makes sense, as those type of games probably wont even be at Wal Mart, let alone that type of more sophisticated consumer purchasing them at Wal Mart.

because you are drawing conclusions from the number and stats you yourself seem to keep an eye out and look for signs? As has been pointed out before; the only way to get any fair idea out of the Amazon sales is by looking at the rankings. If a product is sitting on #8 and another #44, it doesn't mean that the latter is selling over 5 times worse.

For all we know, rank #8 and #44 could be seperated by a ratio of less than 2-1.

It doesn't, but it seems pretty likely. I dont know, it seems like there's probably a mathematical theorom for this somewhere. In theory though, each chart position could be selling exactly one unit more tham the position below. However, I just would put lots and lots of money on the difference being great between places. Well take NPD, the top selling game probably most months will be I think at least 2X the #10 selling game. And it's usually probably 4-10X or more, when we get numbers. And that's just 1 v 10, how much more 10 V 40?

As I mentioned, that's really my major problem with Amazon's charts since new-gen started. PS4 has been 1-10, X1 has been 25-40, and this just reflects a level of hardware sales dominance I dont see month to month in NPD. Although April was almost 2-1, and May should be similar, for example March was much closer between the two.

In conclusion, a lot of words signifying not much :p
 
PS cards are region locked so they'll only work in North America. I believe you can use them in EUR if you create an American account, but this isn't really practical so I doubt many people do it.

I also don't see why more 'PS shoppers' would shop at amazon. Especially considering only around half of the PS4 installbase previously owned a PS3 according to the stat above. PS/XB cards coinciding with hardware sales is far more plausible to me.

I mean their rankings aren't definitive by any means, but so far they have been a perfect 6/6 and soon to be 7/7. When the XB1 narrowly beat the PS4 in December, the XB1/PS4 were 4/8 respectively.
 
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One more note, PS4 really fell off in sales in April. We also saw it fall off a lot in Japan in recent weeks. Personally, I dont think we've seem it stabilize and it could go quite low imo. It's just a thought/possibility of what could be occurring. If it's say, 130K in May NPD, refer to this post as an I told u so :p If it's 200K+, ignore this.

I find each month NPD really interesting because we have such little data and trends on the new gen consoles. It will also be really interesting just how low Xbox goes, whether Wii U beats it (my hunch is it actually wont), etc. Then of course June will be another huge one to find out how the $399 Xbox does. And then the months after that to get a new Xbox baseline...
 
I mean their rankings aren't definitive by any means, but so far they have been a perfect 6/6 and soon to be 7/7. When the XB1 narrowly beat the PS4 in December, the XB1/PS4 were 4/8 respectively.

So, based on what? Highest single SKU vs highest single SKU?

Because I guarantee the first time this doesn't work it's gonna be a bunch of "well it doesn't count cause X console had multiple SKU's".

And then well get a lot of further caveating, well you see in past months the second SKU was below 60, and the second SKU only matters when it's above 55, and whatever... :rolleyes:
 
Again, it's not definitive by any means, but it has proven to be a useful bit of anecdotal evidence so far.

For the most part, there has always been a single SKU that makes up for the majority of hardware sales. March and June are perhaps the only exceptions for XB1 because of the Titanfall bundle and kinectless SKU. Sure the PS4 had several bundles in December, but amazon's semi-trackable stock levels and people at GAF tracking the sales rate of each SKU suggests that the standalone was by far the most popular SKU.
 
Also I realized a new, simplistic theory on what Xbox needs to do to be competitive/even-ish with PS4 sales worldwide...


Xbox needs to cumulatively outsell PS in hardware about 1.5:1 in USA to ~tie it worldwide...


I think you can assume sales trends are very consistent with ratios elsewhere. They of course wont be perfectly consistent, but they shouldn't vary a ton.

What I'm basing this on is simple NPD sales. I think 360 is ~40m and PS3 is around 25m in USA...and they are about tied WW (personally I have 360 a smidge ahead, but it doesn't matter)

I need to vette the numbers better but I can already tell it should be a good rule of thumb. I actually thought of it when I saw some UK sales, where 360 software was about 1.5X PS3 software recently. And it came to me that ratio was about the same as USA LTD hardware of those systems, and a hardware ratio should be a proxy for software.

So I think Xbox needs to be at ~lifetime 1.5X PS in USA/UK to tie worldwide. Which we can drop to be just ~1.5X USA, since we get USA hardware but not UK (UK will follow the trend).

Good rule of thumb I think.

It shows where Xbox has a lot to go. Currently PS4 is what, maybe 1.2X Xbox in USA? Xbox needs to be 50% higher than PS to be even worldwide. So that's a stout hill to climb indeed. I think PS was somewhere around ~>3m so far in NPD, so to be competitive WW right now Xbox would need to be at~ 4.5M+ in USA.

It also shows how shipping those first 10 million in 2005-6 really helped Xbox 360. Last gen Xbox already started with a lead, today it faces the opposite, a deficit.
 
What I'm basing this on is simple NPD sales. I think 360 is ~40m and PS3 is around 25m in USA...and they are about tied WW (personally I have 360 a smidge ahead, but it doesn't matter)
It's the opposite, PS3 is slightly ahead, it happened last year IIRC.
 
Ok some new-gen Amazon research. Checking each month for hardware SKU's in the top 100, comparing to NPD

To start with we immediately find a problem, there is no PS4 for the top 100 for November 2013, and the only X1 is #51. This I recall is because Amazon counts preorders in the month they are preordered. I didn't feel like combing past months so I let it stand. I suspect (almost certain) PS4 preorders were higher in previous months, but I doubt many of the people saying Amazon is 6/6 on NPD knew that.

November 2013 X1=909k, PS4=1138k. SKU's in top 100: Day 1 X1=#51.

December 2013 X1=908k, PS4=865k, SKU's in top 100: X1=#4, PS4=#8,

January 2014 X1=141k, PS4=271k, SKU's in top 100:X1=#16= PS4=#3

February 2014 X1=258k, PS4=268k, SKU's in top 100: X1=#23, Titanfall X1=#71, PS4=#3

March 2014 X1=311k, PS4=371k, SKU's in top 100: Titanfall X1=#11, regular X1=#76, PS4=#1

April 2014 X1=115k, PS4=199k, SKU's in top 100: Titanfall X1=#24, PS4=#5

May 2014 (NPD Monday) SKU's in top 100: Titanfall X1=#39, PS4=#6

June SKU's in top 100 to date (as of 6/14/14) Titanfall X1=#47, Kinect free X1=#52, PS4=#9, Destiny PS4 #18

Welp, there's the data. Make of it what you will. I think it correlates maybe a bit better than I expected.

When you see two X1's in the top 100, it seems to really boost the numbers beyond what you'd expect. Those two months, February and March, X1 did well in absolute terms and versus PS4.

What could we predict for May data with this? I dont know, looks like a slight falloff for PS4 and a larger one for X1? Maybe, 180k PS4, 80k X1? That seems reasonable. What about June? Past two SKU X1 months have been strong for X1. But, both cases had a much higher top X1 SKU. Anyways, we have time to go.

Another thing here is Amazon doesn't have 4 week/5 week like NPD, which will muck with the correlation to absolute quantities for NPD.
 
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