NPD November 2020

Huge kudos to Sony for a well executed launch.

That just goes to show just how far ahead of everyone else COD is WRT consumer appeal. 1st and 2nd for November. 1st and 7th for 2020 YTD.

Kudos to Spiderman for hitting 3rd as a platform exclusive. But it just goes to show just how massive the gulf between 1st and 3rd is for NPD whenever a new COD game comes out as COD wasn't just best across all platforms but was also the best selling on each individual platform that it launched on.

Wish we still got software unit sales numbers.

NSW is likely to pass total lifetime sales for 3DS this Holiday season. It also has a chance to pass PSP, GBA, X360 and PS3 this Holiday season. If it doesn't it'll pass them soon after. If it happens it will have only taken it less than 4 years to do it. Amazing. It is averaging almost 20 million units a year. If sales for it don't slow down it's likely to pass the PS4 in less than 2 years. It'd need another ~4-5 years to reach PS2, however, if sales stayed flat over that time period.

Regards,
SB

 

If PS5 supply is close to 2:1 over XS worldwide.. France seems like 3:1

Is there a thing that MS hasnt failed with this launch?

 

I wouldn't call it a failure. But MS selling according to expectations.

• They felt it would sell better than XBO at launch. And it has, and they planned supply accordingly.
• They felt it likely wouldn't outsell PS5 at launch. This is reasonable considering the gap between PS and Xbox last generation. Even a significant movement from PS to Xbox likely wouldn't erase the gap complete and there really wasn't anything to prompt mass movement of players.
• They could have held exclusives for the XBS-X/S launch, but instead their main focus is on increasing subscribership to Game Pass. Thus they released their exclusives over the course of this year.
• On top of that, they only had one AAA exclusive set for this year ... Halo: Infinite and we saw what happened with that.

MS knows it's 1st party exclusives are lacking this Holiday season, so how far are they willing to compete for capacity at TSMC/AMD? Do they overcommit and end up with expensive Anaconda silicon sitting on store shelves? Or go conservative with something more than XBO but less than what they felt PS5 would sell?

The Lockhart silicon is significantly cheaper as is the machine so it's less of a loss if they have those sitting around. Take a gamble on that one and make more than they think might sell and see if they end up selling.

Thus far, I feel both Sony and MS have executed relatively well this Holiday season.

Sony has done a better job, but it wasn't flawless. The NVME expansion is currently non-functional. There has been OS "quirks" and unstable hardware in some some games with some users. Their external drive expansion is limited to a single drive, etc. But they have compelling exclusives and the performance of games on their system has been very good. All in all a great launch for them, IMO.

MS has likely accomplished most of what they waned to do. Game Pass subscribership continues to climb. XBS-X sold out. XBS-S has drawn new gamers into the Xbox ecosystem as well as into Game Pass. But it has certainly been much rockier than Sony. There's a distinct lack of exclusives, but part of that is due to pushing Game Pass. Their NVME expansion works, unlike Sony and they allow more than 1 external drive to be used. However, when it comes to game performance, the system is obviously not working as expected. At this time we don't know if it's because of GDK or lack of features in the GDK (which will be added in the future). We do know from developer comments that it is currently much harder to code to MS's GDK than it is to Sony's SDK, so that's a big part as well. And finally with everything in flux we don't know if there's anything up with the hardware or not. All in all it certainly could be better, but it's far from a failure.

Now, if XBS-X sales fall off a cliff after the launch month, then the platform as a whole has likely failed in some respects, but so far the launch while flawed isn't the disaster than the XBO launch was.

Regards,
SB

 

Agree completely. Sony's PR department is doing a fantastic job, and it helps that the PS5 is a very capable machine and has launched with some very compelling exclusives.

I'm not sure at this point what, if anything MS can do WRT publicity. Even if the console was winning all performance head-to-heads against PS5 (which it isn't), it wouldn't matter. Your average consumer doesn't give a rats arse about that stuff. There isn't much that MS can point to right now as to why someone should get a XBS-X over a PS5 other than things that are fantastic to have, but not terribly sexy when it comes to advertising.

Their really big AAA exclusives other than Halo: Infinite are likely still 2+ years away at the earliest, although we could see a Forza title next year. Whatever the Coalition is working on (like Gears 6) is likely 2-3 years away. If Rare is working on something other than SoT, it's likely 2+ years away. Any big AAA titles from their newly acquired studios is likely also 2+ years away.

It's possible that Psychonauts 2 might come out next year, but I'm not sure whether that holds large AAA appeal. Flight Simulator is coming next year to XBS, I think. But I'm not sure how much mass appeal that has despite being an absolutely phenomenal technical achievement.

They've potentially got some Bethesda titles coming, but anything releasing next year will be multi-platform due to contractual obligations.

There's likely to be a fair few smaller exclusive titles from the studios that they've acquired which will drive interest in Game Pass, but I'm not sure any of them is enough to sell people on XBS-X/S.

So, it's a bit of a holding pattern for them.

Regards,
SB

 

- The Series X|S debuted lower than XB1 <- what does that mean? I thought MS sold more in the launch of this gen than the last one?

 

Maybe more overall since they included more territories but less focus on the NPD Market which is United States only? So higher WorldWide but lower US?

 

Well they are supply limited, but still that sounds defensive by MS. Will be interesting to see how it looks end of next year.

 

They launched in 13 countries for XBO. Another 8 a few months after that.

They launched in 37 countries for XBS-X/S. Another 4 by the end of the Holiday season.

Regards,
SB

 

I wonder how Sony and Microsoft balance these decisions. The fewer markets you release in the more stock and more penetration/traction you gain at the expense of potentially losing that elsewhere.

 

In Microsoft's case, I feel it's to broaden the appeal of the brand across more countries.

This is especially true if you consider the XBS-S. Enthusiasts in 1st world countries might turn their noses up at them, but in poorer countries, it'll be closer to being affordable to a larger community of gamers compared to the astronomical price of a PS5 or XBS-X in those countries. If MS can make Game Pass available in those countries, then it becomes quite a bit more attractive.

In other words, their goal at launch doesn't appear to be to try to boost countries they are already established in, but to expand in countries where they have little to no presence.

If you consider that they currently don't have what they need to go head to head with Sony and the PS5, this makes sense. Make sure you have at least adequate supply in established countries and then make a play for countries where the PS5/XBS-X are far too expensive for the vast majority of the population.

Regards,
SB

 

MS need to get exclusives out in the market, have them review well and piggyback off that.

Effectively treat this year as laying out the groundwork for a marketing blitz next holiday season.

Remember the ps3 gifs of it not clearing the 100k a month sold hurdles and high jumps? Get those ready for Series X/S March onwards.

 

Yeah. It's great that MS went from 6 studios to 23 in only 3 years, but they're going to be feeling the pain for another year or two until they can finally get Halo, Fable, Forza, FlightSim, Psychonauts, Hellblade, Everwild, Gears, and Avowed out the door.