NPD January 2008

[AlphaWolf]

Wasn't that ps3 price cut in november? And isn't microsoft saying they'll have shortages for february and likely march too?

MS only said they 'under estimated demand'. Some industry analysts suspect that MS is up to something, GDC starts tomorrow, if they have something up I expect we'll find out shortly.

 

[....]

MS only said they 'under estimated demand'. Some industry analysts suspect that MS is up to something, GDC starts tomorrow, if they have something up I expect we'll find out shortly.

They better have something if they don't and it's a shortage, they better fix things by april or it'll be catastrophic.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

Tell them to stop playing shortage games then. Or get MS to fix the rrod issue so they can stop sending out new units to people who sent in their broken ones.

Yeah. I'll tell Steve Ballmer the next time I have sex with his daughter.

 

[djskribbles]

Yeah, but this is months after the $399 model launch, which is a pretty key price point. We've seen temporary spikes in the past with PS3 price drops/upgrades, so it's not unreasonable to expect that we're witnessing another.

We'll see what explanations and solutions we get for the 360 shortages in the coming weeks. My guess is MS is planning something for the months before the GTA launch.

January is always a slow month for sales, plus it was a 4 week period for NPD vs 5 weeks last year (i dunno why you left that part of my post out). so again, theres no denying the numbers for Sony were pretty good.
also, all i said was i don't see sales dropping as much as they did last year, because last year it was near the PS3's launch. i wouldn't even be surprised if NPD Feb numbers are higher than last month with the death of HD DVD and all.

it will be interesting what MS does before GTA. i just hope, for Sony's sake, they have something ready in case.

 

[AlphaWolf]

January is always a slow month for sales, plus it was a 4 week period for NPD vs 5 weeks last year (i dunno why you left that part of my post out). so again, theres no denying the numbers for Sony were pretty good.
also, all i said was i don't see sales dropping as much as they did last year, because last year it was near the PS3's launch. i wouldn't even be surprised if NPD Feb numbers are higher than last month with the death of HD DVD and all.

it will be interesting what MS does before GTA. i just hope, for Sony's sake, they have something ready in case.

January is not a slow month, never has been. It's an above average month, its slower than Nov, Dec.

 

[djskribbles]

fair enough. i just thought January would be slow because its after the holiday season.

regardless, other than that, i still stand by my post.

 

[Tap In]

and don 't you mean Jan 2007.

woops fixed... thanks :smile:

 

[Mintmaster]

Wasn't that ps3 price cut in november?

Yeah, but remember that before the PS3 no mainstream console has ever cost over $399. This price drop was almost like a relaunch.

PS3 wasn't really out of stock at launch, yet it had a decent January 2007 and big drop afterwards. It's a bit premature to say that PS3 sales are getting close to 360 or Wii in NA.

And isn't microsoft saying they'll have shortages for february and likely march too?

Like I said, who knows what they're up to. I think that if they do have production problems, then they'd likely shortchange NA first.

 

[TheChefO]

In this gen though which exactly is the lead platform?
Things are more complicated than last gen

Indeed.

However, I'd say it is much easier as a developer to target a game to a market in this gen. Thus, if a dev/pub isn't looking to go multiplat, they will pick and choose based on the target region, and demographic.

The end result is still the same. The console with more units in a region will be targeted more for game production.

Wii is quite a bit different from ps3 and xb360, but that still leaves xb360 and ps3 gunning for much the same demographic.

That leaves only units/region as a variable. In the US, that is still a very one sided decision if a dev isn't porting. In Japan, it is also a very one sided decision. EU is too close to sway at this point.



In short, sales threads and results like these are still very important at this early stage of this cycle as they will have an impact on what software is available down the road and potentially into the next generation of consoles as well.