Some Strange PS3 sale numbers

P

PatrickL

Veteran
Game, a big french retailer issued a press relesase today with strange numbers. You can find the article here

Selon le communiqué daté du 3 avril, il s'est vendu près de 8.000 PlayStation 3 au sein des 160 enseignes depuis le lancement, avec un taux d'attachement de 3,1 articles par console vendue, sans distinction entre accessoires et jeux. Le groupe précise que sa part de marché sur l'offre PlayStation 3 s'établit à 13%, ce qui le positionne en numéro 2 derrière Micromania.
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Rough translation:
According to the release issued on April 3, we sold almost 8 000 PS3 in our 160 shops since the launch, with a 3.1 attach rate (including accessories and software). The retailer adds that it s market share on PS3 is at 13 %, which is the second place behind Micromania.

What is strange is if you look again theses numbers: it means that according to them there were less than 62 000 PS3 (8000/13%) sold in france since launch, way less than the 78 K for the 2 first days we heard before.
 
PatrickL said:
Game, a big french retailer issued a press relesase today with strange numbers. You can find the article here

Rough translation:
According to the release issued on April 3, we sold almost 8 000 PS3 in our 160 shops since the launch, with a 3.1 attach rate (including accessories and software). The retailer adds that it s market share on PS3 is at 13 %, which is the second place behind Micromania.

What is strange is if you look again theses numbers: it means that according to them there were less than 62 000 PS3 (8000/13%) sold in france since launch, way less than the 78 K for the 2 first days we heard before.
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They have 13% of the shipped console 13000 for a total of 100 000, not 13% ot the sales.
 
PatrickL said:
Maybe, where did you see that in the press release? Or do you have another link ?
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It's just the correct translation. They got 13% of the launch units, 2nd behind Micromania, giving them 13000 consoles. Of that 13000, they sold 8000 with an attach rate of 3.1.
 
It is not the correct translation, it is the interpretaion on some forums like GK forums.
But in fact your interpretation is worse because if you think they got 13 K PS3 for launch and sold only 8 K 10 days after, you get lower sales.
 
PatrickL said:
Game, a big french retailer issued a press relesase today with strange numbers. You can find the article here

Rough translation:
According to the release issued on April 3, we sold almost 8 000 PS3 in our 160 shops since the launch, with a 3.1 attach rate (including accessories and software). The retailer adds that it s market share on PS3 is at 13 %, which is the second place behind Micromania.

What is strange is if you look again theses numbers: it means that according to them there were less than 62 000 PS3 (8000/13%) sold in france since launch, way less than the 78 K for the 2 first days we heard before.
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Does it really matter?

The PS3 was launched in Europe, some consoles were sold. The launch was not a failure, e.g. Jaguar/3DO sales levels. The launch was not insane e.g. PS2 sales levels, riots in the streets.

Some people appear to be obsessed with talking down the PS3 European launch. This statement is not directed at anyone in particular, no offence meant to you Patrick.

Unit sales is something that comes under scrutiny from the Stock Market. It would be very unwise for a company to mislead shareholders.
 
Nick Laslett said:
The launch was not insane e.g. PS2 sales levels
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It would be easier to even compare PS2 sales levels in Europe if there had been sufficient consoles available at launch. As it stands, there were about 10x as many consoles available at the European launch (50000 vs 5000 in the Benelux for instance), and so the European PS3 launch blew the European PS2 launch out of the water. But since there were even more consoles available than there were sold, it all went rather smoothly and hence without too much insanity.
 
Arwin said:
It would be easier to even compare PS2 sales levels in Europe if there had been sufficient consoles available at launch. As it stands, there were about 10x as many consoles available at the European launch (50000 vs 5000 in the Benelux for instance), and so the European PS3 launch blew the European PS2 launch out of the water. But since there were even more consoles available than there were sold, it all went rather smoothly and hence without too much insanity.
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And it's because of that fact that it's going to be near impossible to truly judge PS3 sales as relative to 360, Wii or PS2 for quite some time yet. Without knowing just how well each of those systems would have sold were they not supply limited we'll simply have to wait until we can reasonably expect PS3 sales to have settled and see what month by month sales are like for each system. I do have to admit though that I am a little surprised PS3 isn't still supply limited, the amount of time it took Wii (still going in some places) and 360 to have standing stock I expected PS3 to be able to sell whatever (reasonably expected) number they could provide.

To move back onto the original topic, I don't think we can necessarily read anything into this report, it's not specific as to whether their "market share" refers to the number of consoles they were allocated or their percentage of distributed consoles within France. It's probably going to be a little while until we know true numbers, though software sales figures should start to give at least a base line for the minimum possible number sold...
 
PatrickL said:
It is not the correct translation, it is the interpretaion on some forums like GK forums.
But in fact your interpretation is worse because if you think they got 13 K PS3 for launch and sold only 8 K 10 days after, you get lower sales.
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Do you speak french?
 
Do they perhaps include software and accessories in their calculation of market share?
 
Well, perhaps the game doesn't want to be seen as a poor market share saler: 8000 = 13% is better than 8000 = 10% :D
 
PatrickL said:
I did it in the first post :p

And if you consider that news : http://gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=23977 you can guess that Game was not the only retailer to not have so great sales.
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What does this mean? Say that the figures were typical for all retailers. Then assuming the first week sales are equivalent to the opening week's sales and stand at 165.000.

If the second week sales dropped by 82%, that means 29700 consoles were sold in the second week, in the UK, bringing the PS3's ltd to 194700 and pretty much clearing the first allocation.

29700 in one week is still a lot, for just the UK. Again, would this be extrapolated to European sales (600.000 vs 165.000 just in the UK), that would bring it at roughly 100.000 weekly sales, or about 420.000 a month.

It would have been a total shock to me if the figure had dropped any less, to be honest! And I wouldn't be surprised either if the figure drops a bit further either. In my opinion the machine is good value, but there's only so many who can spare the cash at this point in time.

We'll see.

But it's a mistake to consider sales to be bad from this '82% drop' in week 2. That's what you get when you've got plenty of consoles around eh? Most people got to buy it in the first weekend. This week is Easter, will be interesting to see if that influences things.

I have to say though, that people who can read a certain language, doesn't automatically mean they can read in the first place. ;) (I should know, I read 5 languages)
 
Silent, I wouldn't call posting news with REAL and OFFICIAL numbers from european retailers sales of PS3 doing any kind of downplaying.

If the truth say that the Sony statements about PS3 sales in Europe sound a little spinned off, maybe Sony was trying to elude the public by releasing their wholesale figures with no mention to it being wholesale in hope that the public takes those number as retail sales numbers.

Chart Track affirmed Sales of PS3 on second week decreased by 87% and GAME stated that they sold 8.000 PS3 so far and that they received 13% of France's allocation of PS3.

Where's the spin off?
 
Well, the point is:
- Do they have 13% of the sales, which would be conflicting with the 78k number => solution favoured by PatrickL
- Do they have 13% of the total supply by Sony, which is not really an issue.
 
I have favoured nothing. It is just what they said. They never talked about Sony total shipments. And in that case, which one, the 100 k for launch day or the 150 k that Sony promised after 10 days ? Because you know we are already at that stage.

Anyway I just posted that link because for a change we got official numbers from a retailer and a public company.
If I was trying to downplay Sony I could just have posted a link to another french website (inpact virtuel) that made an article yesterday asking if Sony numbers were just fake. As that article did not have any data we coud confirm, I did not link it here.
 
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