All purpose Sales and Sales Rumors and Anecdotes [2018 Edition]

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It seems to be the trend. The less hard data you give anybody the happier corporations seem to be.

I wonder how long Nintendo and Sony will keep it up. I do recall for a time Sony was combining PS2 and Ps3 shipments in it's reports or something like that?

No they will continue to give numbers because they win. If they are not as sucessful, they will not give number. Everytime Xbox One is selling better than PS4 in NPD, Microsoft is very vocal about it... And if next generation Xbox is the new leader they will give the number again...
 
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No they will continue to give numbers because they win. If they are not as sucessful, they will not give number. Everytime Xbox One is selling better than PS4 in NPD, Microsoft is very vocal about it... And if next generation Xbox is the new leader they will give the number again...

I agree with why they stopped giving numbers, but I wonder even if they get back on top if they will ever give #'s again. I have my doubts.

No info is always better than some, to these companies.

The thing is NPD still announces the best selling console each month (no numbers). This is all that platform holder needs, to have plenty to crow about, without revealing any info.

Recently I noticed Mat Piscetalla said NPD CANT give numbers because it's in contract with the manufacturers. This sucks but it means no hope for NPD of ever giving numbers or probably, platform holders either, possibly EVEN THEIR OWN. I know Greenberg tweeted Xbox sales once a few months ago (buried in a reply chain at that) but he has not done it since.

But it's funny NPD USED to give out the numbers and it was OK.
 
Some interesting sales numbers that I don't think were posted here. Zhuge said this in February:

https://wccftech.com/analyst-xbox-one-sales-35-million/

And this was posted today: https://www.dualshockers.com/ea-est...million-year-switch-expected-pass-30-million/

So there's some discrepancy between the numbers. Zhuge thinks EA's numbers are correct, but he suspects they're tracking the numbers differently.

ZhugeEx said:
No worries. I'm not sure what the reason is for the discrepancy with EA's estimates.
It could be it excludes Pro/One X numbers.
It could be that EA excludes a territory like Japan (they used to do this last generation)
It could be that EA estimates PS4 at a lower number. (Which would be weird given Sony release the official numbers)
It could be that installed base =/= sell through in EA's eyes. So replacement consoles sold wouldn't count and only people actively using consoles would count?

EA's estimates aren't wrong. I'm just fairly certain one of the above things is true.

Ultimately what we do know is PS4 sell through was 73.6m at the end of 2017. Xbox One is less than half of that total which shows the big gap between the two in terms of sales. But that's something that has been known for a long time.

I find it pretty interesting that my formula for estimating XB1 sales has been pretty consistent throughout this entire gen, or at least has been close to what analysts are estimating. My guess was 34-35M as of the end of 2017.

Surprisingly, VGCharts is also close.
 
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Since this is the anecdote thread.

In Norway there are at least 700k PS4, my co-worker got the info from NRK at a conference (NRK is the BBC of Norway), they know this because they have an app for streaming ala Netflix/HBO etc.

Not sure if that is sold in Norway or those that have the app installed and I assume this includes PS4P.

But 700k out of 5.2M people is not a bad ratio.
 
Zhuge said that EA's numbers don't even match up with their own previous estimates. So he suspects that EA is probably either excluding Pro/X or are excluding Japan (which they have done before).

Pro sales were probably around 5-6M as of that date, and X sales were probably around 1M.
PS4 sales in Japan were around 5.9M and XB1 sales were around 90K.

Not that it changes things much.
 
Zhuge said that EA's numbers don't even match up with their own previous estimates. So he suspects that EA is probably either excluding Pro/X or are excluding Japan (which they have done before).

Pro sales were probably around 5-6M as of that date, and X sales were probably around 1M.
PS4 sales in Japan were around 5.9M and XB1 sales were around 90K.

Not that it changes things much.

Probably not intentional.

My question is why would EA need to independently track console sales?

It wouldn’t be very partner like to force pubs to spend resources trying to figure out how many consoles are in the wild when those figures are necessary to project future sales which help determine budgets for new projects.

My guess is that EA is getting figures directly from Sony and MS. And while Sony is providing actual hardware estimates, MS is providing MAU based estimates specifically attached to the Xbox platform.

MAU might skew lower than actual hardware sales (Slims and Pros/Xs promote sales to current users) but either can be used with historical trends to predict future sales.

EA may just be lumping the two numbers together just for PR purposes because internally I doubt such a number is useful. Consoles and games don’t sell equally across regions so it would be more practical to estimate sales by console brand not some overall console figure.
 
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EA probably have a certain amount of console that aren't being used at all or are broken worked into there estimates and that why the numbers seem low.
 
Zhuge said that EA's numbers don't even match up with their own previous estimates. So he suspects that EA is probably either excluding Pro/X or are excluding Japan (which they have done before).

Excluding Japan thing actually makes a fair amount of sense to me and seems plausible. A console sold in Japan wont be of much use to EA in projecting how much their games might sell etc.

If it's such a "big deal" maybe someone could ask them the origin of the estimate on their next call in presumably 3 months.
 
Ea talks corporate gobbledygook (and some sense maybe too) about why everybody is all about the MAU's

Colin Alan Sebastian - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc.

And then secondly, looking at the phasing of the year in terms of revenues, it looks like the fourth quarter is expected to be similar to this past year, and I wonder what that means in terms of your expectations for Anthem, given that you also have the Battlefield content in Q4 as well. Thanks.

Blake J. Jorgensen - Electronic Arts, Inc.

So on the guidance piece, a couple things I think you'll note. We didn't use unit sales metrics for any of our titles. And as you've heard in the past, we're trying to move away from that. This is an example of how our business model has changed. Unit sales are much less indicative of long-term franchise health due to the significant power of our event-driven live services now.

The live services component is really the bedrock of our business. And while units sold to grow that are important, they become misleading in many ways to the Street. And so we'll stay away from unit predictions for any titles going forward unless there's some unique reason for it.

In the case of Anthem, the real issue is, the game will be shipped in the last quarter of the year and in the last month of that quarter, meaning we'll probably have limited restocking of the title, even if it's extremely successful. Since it is new IP, we're being conservative in how we're thinking about it. We're very excited about the game. It's extremely unique, and I think players are going to really enjoy playing it, but we're careful not to put too large of a forecast in there. And clearly, it will impact this year as well as next year as we not only continue to sell more into the next year but start rolling out the live services associated with that game.
 
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