NPD November 2008

[RobertR1]

Yes, that is where the discussion was, until it was turned by RobertR1 into a 'how in the hell did MS: PR sell 1 million copies, my experience in a handful of stores says otherwise".

To a Publisher / Developer, Shipped is sold. They sell the game to the retailer.

Any PR for stuff that is "sold to consumers" (like Microsoft so often releases when Halo hits) is just so more people buy into the hype . If it's bigger than spider man 3, it must be amazing, right? More people buy it, more stock is ordered.

Unfortunately, the way things are now, the used game market makes additional shipments much smaller, so the intial sold to retailers is what the bread and butter is for developers / publishers.

So if MS: PR shipped 1 million copies to retailers / Sony for bundles, then Evolution did pretty good for themselves, since I'm sure MS: PR cost them far less than the original title.

What am I trying to discredit? I'm being told that MSR sold 1 million copies within a short time. That's huge! and should certainly make an impact. But where were these 1million copies sold? We got NPD figures for it which were quite low (under 100k) and it had very poor EU debuts and then it turned to talks of "bundles" Where were these bundles sold? and out of the various PS3 bundles in Europe, MSR is the one selling gangbusters?

I have no problem believing MSR had totaled 1mil with a combination of sold to consumer, sitting on shelves, sold in bundles and sitting on shelves in bundles. However, the spin seems to be sold to consumers which would certainly have an impact in console sales, especially if majority of them would be bundles as individual sales have been poor.

 

[obonicus]

I have to go check the numbers but I believe that the xbox 360 has ist all time largest lead in the npd numbers LTD over the ps3. that is not a good thing tha ttheir lead keeps growing

Well, isn't it only natural? They outsold the PS3 last year, they outsold the PS3 this year... you'd imagine the lead would go up.

 

[Rangers]

Not really hard evidence, though, considering we lack numbers all over. The only numbers we have are Sony's; they may be wrong, Denny may have misspoken, but they're out there.



But they make that differentiation, even if it's with extreme weaseldom like 'sold to retail'. It's different from x many 'sales'. Like I said, they don't lie (not because they're honest, but because lies are unnecessary, easy to see through and can get them in trouble).

We have no hard numbers for any game, even the bestsellers we only get those months they are in the NPD top 10, so we can say any game sold 1 million, or ten million, or twenty million, and cant really technically be disproven. Even if we somehow, actually got a LTD figure for most of Europe, we could then take the argument to its next logical step and say game X very well might have sold Y (lets say, 100 million) because we dont know what it sold in Mexico, Taiwan, Korea, Eastern Europe, or Bangladesh. It's not reasonable, though.

As for shipped versus sold, again have to disagree, all the companies say sold when they mean shipped, and no they do not take any pains to make what they mean clear.

Heck, in my previous posts I'm strongly doubting Motorstorm 2 shipped one million, never mind actually debating whether it sold through that number, which is even that much more ridiculously unlikely imo. To ship 1m it would probably have to have sold through oh, maybe at least 600k, and I dont see how it could have at all. Forget 1 million.

Personally I suspect the Sony man meant M1. Or they must have been bundling a heck of a lot of them in Europe (but I really doubt this to be honest). But, we're not going to convince each other.

Even vgchartz, yes gasp, had the game at 250k WW I believe. Yes they have no data, but it shows what a reasonable person would probably expect the sales to be.

 

[Arwin]

Goodness gracious ...

I love Motorstorm 2, I'd rate it a 10/10, and I think whomever rated this 8 or less is either an idiot or a hypocrit (or Edge, in which case it would have been fine as their policy says you have to bring something new to the table to score higher than 8).

But if there is one thing painfully clear is that it's not selling an aweful lot. Certainly not 1 million already. It may sell a lot eventually, but not this year I'm afraid. The 240.000 mentioned above WW is probably more likely. Which is a crying shame, but it could have been worse I guess.

Could we drop that subject now though? Too many posts wasted on it!

 

[bkilian]

Overall, I don't think Sony is disappointed with these numbers. Right now MS is probably taking a bigger loss on the arcade than Sony is on the 40GB, because HDD+BR+whatever is unlikely to cost $200 (though MS probably makes some of that back through HDD sales).

I don't believe MS is losing significant money on the Arcade (in my opinion - based on the laser focus on profitability in the division at the moment)

Is the PS3 that expensive to make when we already have sub $200 Bluray players?

You can't compare the BOM of the PS3 and Standalone BD players. The PS3, like the 360, has no hardware for decoding and playing high def streams, it all has to be done in software. Think back to the days of the the RealMagic Hollywood+ MPEG decoder cards. Which was cheaper, the card, or a PC capable of playing the same stream in software? A Broadcom or Sigma SOC is significantly smaller and cheaper to produce than the Cell, nevermind the GPU.

But is being behind 360 by 1mil a success or failure for sony this year? Given the pricepoint of the PS3 i would say its a great success!

I don't know, considering every year the Sony apologists insist that that year the PS3 is not only going to beat the 360, but actually become dominant, I'd have to say that getting further behind each year is not helping them achieve this goal. I mean, iSuppli, Datamonitor, and the Yankee Group predict each year that the PS3 will dominate (although their timeline keeps moving out a year each time they do it). At what point will they accept defeat?

Yes, especially when considering their market share in terms of sales (not just absolute numbers).

The market grew considerably, and Sony's numbers and market share dropped considerably despite this being the "year of the Playstation".

But isn't 2009 now the year of the playstation? I suppose it could be 2010...

 

[Laa-Yosh]

I will say Sony is in "trouble" but far from a sinking ship. They will eventually break even with the PS3. Perhaps they won't be the Sony of Old, but this is far from killing them.

Are you sure? One could argue that Sony should just shut down its console business completely to minimize losses in an already hostile economical enviroment...

They are in serious trouble, they have to completely re-think their strategy for the long term future. They've pretty much failed to meet most of their goals. They've lost at least half of their PS2 userbase - the casual players - to the Wii, and MS has pushed them aside in the US. They're loosing first party developers, third party support gets rocky, and I could go on...

What else would you call a sign of a sinking ship, what other kind of problems should they present? They can still save themselves, but so far the situation has not exactly been improving.

 

[22psi]

CNN's take on PS3's performance:

here

 

[tha_con]

What am I trying to discredit? I'm being told that MSR sold 1 million copies within a short time. That's huge! and should certainly make an impact. But where were these 1million copies sold? We got NPD figures for it which were quite low (under 100k) and it had very poor EU debuts and then it turned to talks of "bundles" Where were these bundles sold? and out of the various PS3 bundles in Europe, MSR is the one selling gangbusters?

I have no problem believing MSR had totaled 1mil with a combination of sold to consumer, sitting on shelves, sold in bundles and sitting on shelves in bundles. However, the spin seems to be sold to consumers which would certainly have an impact in console sales, especially if majority of them would be bundles as individual sales have been poor.

Like I stated before, sold is shipped. The publisher / developer almost always announces shipped numbers as sold, because to them, it is.

They sell those copies of the game to the retailer. Thus, they sold 1 million copies of the game world wide.

 

[fearsomepirate]

The game itself says low production values, but we hear about how they had been working on it for two years and how so much work went into it.

It's all about man-hours. Twenty people working on a game for two years is roughly as expensive as 200 people working on a game for 10 weeks.

 

[obonicus]

It's all about man-hours. Twenty people working on a game for two years is roughly as expensive as 200 people working on a game for 10 weeks.

True, it's not the general impression I got. Nintendo was trying to convince people it wasn't a low-budget game (bad MIDI notwithstanding). Gotta wonder what the rest of Nintendo EAD is doing, though... maybe the (totally fan-made) rumors are true, and Nintendo's holding back all its output for the release of Motion+.

 

[obonicus]

They're loosing first party developers, third party support gets rocky, and I could go on...

Are they? That's the one thing they've held onto, at least so far. Or do you mean they WILL lose first-party devs?

What else would you call a sign of a sinking ship, what other kind of problems should they present? They can still save themselves, but so far the situation has not exactly been improving.

I don't think Sony's eager to drop out of the console business; they'd lose a ton more money, and I think the signs are there that Sony was on the road to profitability before the dollar plummeted against the yen. Of course, it's may be up to shareholders. Still, PS2 was so recent for Sony, and such an utter success that I wonder if they'd ditch what was once their flagship because of a series of bad decisions (which the current SCEI management has been trying to recover from for a while)?

 

[thatdude90210]

Looks like the PS2 is seriously losing steam. It sold 206k in Nov, and no software in the top 10. The recent price cut on the 360 arcade made that a better alternative. For ~$70 more, the 360 Arcade is basically a better version of the PS2.

 

[obonicus]

Looks like the PS2 is seriously losing steam. It sold 206k in Nov, and no software in the top 10. The recent price cut on the 360 arcade made that a better alternative. For ~$70 more, the 360 Arcade is basically a better version of the PS2.

It'd happen sooner or later, no shock there. PS2 had its time in the sun, I don't think anyone's going to begrudge that an 8-year console sold only 200k this month. I sorta even wonder if we'll ever see a console with such a breadth of titles as the PS2 again.

The main problem for Sony isn't that PS2 is slowing down, it's that the PS3 hasn't replaced it.

 

[thatdude90210]

Here's some harsh news for those who thought that LBP was going to be the "wiisports for the PS3" -- the game changer that brings in the casual masses: LBP 141k.

 

[Freak'n Big Panda]

I think it was pretty obvious LBP wasn't going to do much for the ps3. It's not like it's a recognized franchise among the masses. Likewise I don't think KZ2 will do much either, it'll do better than LBP for sure but it's not going move hardware like mgs4 did that's for sure. Gt5 is guaranteed to move hardware but that's not coming till 2010 and other than that it's looking pretty bleak now that ff13 is on both 360 and ps3. I think Sony is just trying to recoup their losses at this point, the war is clearly over from my POV.

 

[dobwal]

Are you sure? One could argue that Sony should just shut down its console business completely to minimize losses in an already hostile economical enviroment...

They are in serious trouble, they have to completely re-think their strategy for the long term future. They've pretty much failed to meet most of their goals. They've lost at least half of their PS2 userbase - the casual players - to the Wii, and MS has pushed them aside in the US. They're loosing first party developers, third party support gets rocky, and I could go on...

What else would you call a sign of a sinking ship, what other kind of problems should they present? They can still save themselves, but so far the situation has not exactly been improving.

Sony is in no way in serious trouble and shutting down PS3 would be detrimental to the gaming division.

A shut down would be useless as a short term measure because of all the implications a shut down would create for the long term viability of the division.

Devs aren't going to provide a lot of support to a dying PS3 userbase and PS4's prospective support would take a definitive hit as devs aren't going to very trusting of Sony's commitment to the new console.

Furthermore, consumers are going to have major reservations with buying a PS4 with Sony already having a history of given up on one of its consoles.

Sony is simply going to allow the PS3 to limp along until the next generation PS4 is ready.

 

[Afrikan]

Are you sure? One could argue that Sony should just shut down its console business completely to minimize losses in an already hostile economical enviroment...

They are in serious trouble, they have to completely re-think their strategy for the long term future. They've pretty much failed to meet most of their goals. They've lost at least half of their PS2 userbase - the casual players - to the Wii, and MS has pushed them aside in the US. They're loosing first party developers, third party support gets rocky, and I could go on...

What else would you call a sign of a sinking ship, what other kind of problems should they present? They can still save themselves, but so far the situation has not exactly been improving.

Laa-Yosh... I will say you are very consistent with your posts regarding Sony...... either way which 1st party developers are Sony losing?

You also say that they failed to meet most of their goals....what were their goals this gen?

and NO I don't think Sony should shutdown their console business completely to minimize (I'm laughing as I'm writing this haha) losses in this hostile economic environment.....but I'm no expert

 

[betan]

Look, those are the numbers. From here. If you want to doubt them, please bring the evidence. They usually differentiate between shipped and sold, even if it's with clever PR-speak. Maybe Denny made a mistake by saying '1 million sales', but I'd like more than 'my trip to England tells me otherwise!'.

Sold generally means sold to retailers. It's not a PR spin either. That's how they make money you know.

 

[tirminyl]

Are you sure? One could argue that Sony should just shut down its console business completely to minimize losses in an already hostile economical enviroment...

They are in serious trouble, they have to completely re-think their strategy for the long term future. They've pretty much failed to meet most of their goals. They've lost at least half of their PS2 userbase - the casual players - to the Wii, and MS has pushed them aside in the US. They're loosing first party developers, third party support gets rocky, and I could go on...

What else would you call a sign of a sinking ship, what other kind of problems should they present? They can still save themselves, but so far the situation has not exactly been improving.

Shutdown an entire division due to short term losses? That is a problem with most companies and with post people financially. They always look at the short term solution and never long term. As stated, Sony will continue on. If they botch next generation and the one after that, then we have problems. It's almost like people saying Nintendo should just quit because they lost their dominant position and was relegated to the back.

I am curious, what 1st party developers are they losing? I don't remember Sony shutting down, selling or losing any 1st party studios like Microsoft have.

How is the 3rd party support rocky? It is certainly better than what it was the previous year. Is it going to somehow get worse?

 

[thatdude90210]

Gamespot has the full top 20 in software. Here's number 11-20, they didn't give numbers:

11) Animal Crossing: City Folk (Wii) / Nintendo
12) Fallout 3 (Xbox 360) / Bethesda Softworks
13) Rock Band (Wii) / MTV Games
14) Pokemon Ranger: Shadows of Almia (DS) / Nintendo
15) Guitar Hero World Tour (Xbox 360) / Activision Blizzard
16) Mario Kart (DS) / Nintendo
17) Guitar Hero World Tour (PS2) / Activision Blizzard
18) WWE SmackDown vs. RAW 2009 (PS2) / THQ
19) Fable II (Xbox 360) / Microsoft
20) Madden NFL 09 (Xbox 360) / Electronic Arts