The Official November 2010 NPD Thread

[MaxwellGT2000]

kowenicki said:

MaxwellGT2000 said:

TRios_Zen said:

MaxwellGT2000 said:

Nsanity said:

Edouble24 said:

Nice chart showing revenue for the month. 360 going strong. 

hot damn!

Oh what you can get away with when you say revenue  revenue data is quite literally useless to anyone but the publisher/manufacturer and it's only for their titles/products.  It's like this Wii sells 1m software units at 50  while 360 does 1m units at 60, revenue from the Wii title is 50m dollars, the 360 title brings in 60m dollars and therefore a higher % on a pie chart like that, the only problem? If a title like that cost something like 45 million on the 360 and 11.25 million on Wii, after console makers get their cut, you count expenses like production of discs and shipment, the 360 title breaks even, and the Wii game came out making a mint.

The same can be applied to those months PS3 were sold at a loss, they could have the entire pie, Sony still wasn't doing good business.  So yeah revenue charts, in general, are some of the most useless data you could ever be given, only good to fan some console war flames.

While I agree that data CAN sometimes be meaningless, I'm not sure I'm following your argument here.

The data in this chart IS presented as "Revenue" data.  Nothing disingenuous there.  additionally the size of the "accessories" pie chart is clearly skewed given the cost of Kinect, and while that is not explicit here, a passing knowledge of sales and this market would tell you that.  Finally while your cost/profit argument IS true, that would be relevant at a more macro level, or if you were trying to prove something about earnings here...however that is not what is being presented.

From this data, you can see that revenues, in America were clearly skewed in favor of the 360, period.  Anything else that is inferred from this would basically be user error, no? 

My argument wasn't about what's being discussed, but rather that the data is outright meaningless,and then presented examples of why it is useless.  Essentially it's a waste of peoples time and the average poster takes more from it than what it is, more or less it's me informing people of what they're looking at before they go around yelling about the data from the highest mountain.

And yes anything more would be user error but with revenue, people tend to translate that to 'wow that company made a lot of money', people typically get it confused with profit, you probably know that as well as I do.

Me personally my objective is to see the game industry thrive so I'll always be focused on companies staying alive so I can keep on playing good games 

Yes its only a part of the picture...

To get profit you NEED revenue...  and yes I am constantly saying to people that "revenue is vanity and profit is sanity".

But in this instance the revenue comparison isnt remotely bogus and is a helpful and informative measure in this circumstance particularly when the selling price for the 360 is less than the PS3 and yet the revcenue is almost twice.

Uh... one sku being the arcade/core is cheaper than the PS3, two of them are the price of a PS3... and you have one that is 100 dollars more... Yeah we know the 360 sold more hardware units than the PS3 we have numbers for that, there's no reason to justify it more with revenue numbers. Again just adding fuel to some stupid console war between forum posters.  

And this actually makes me think where did these guys get their revenue numbers from exactly? They posted this:

"Stitching together figures and proportions provided in the comments of Michael Pachter (analyst for Wedbush Securities), Anita Frazier (analyst for the NPD Group), and in Microsoft's own press release, we have what we believe is a reasonable picture of the Xbox 360's strong showing last month."

Which still doesn't tell me where they got their SKU breakdown, NPD didn't provide it that's for sure, and if they don't have that they don't even have accurate revenue data.  

So really what is the need to continue this rubbish?  Revenue data without an expenses report, the revenue data is "stitched" together, and we already have console sales data... what more is there to prove?  This data isn't doing anything.