Sorry, I am re-starting this thread because for some reason I could not read my replies to the original. There's something in a post on that thread that is breaking the forum.. First a myth to clear up, NPD adds in an estimate for Walmart and other stores which they don't collect hard sales numbers from. You can find this information in this document Understanding NPD's Point of Sale Data http://www.adobe.com/macromedia/ir/macr/whitepapers/npd_pos.pdf Second I'll summarize the info we have. NPD sales in NA through end of October were 3.2 million. Early estimates of sales in NA through November & December are 2 million. It should be noted I'd say that is an over-estimate, but I'll keep it for this exercise. So total we expect through the end of year in NA is about 5.2 million. Estimate in Japan until a week ago was 280k. I would guess it's around 300k at end of December. Rest of world hisorically sold 45% of NA (from Microsoft historical information). 45% of 5.2 million is 2.34 million. Add it all together we get 5.2 + 0.3 + 2.34 = 7.84 million I would however include some margin of error like 10%, would give us a number of 7.9 million +/- 800k. If Microsoft hit its target of 'shipping' 10 million consoles by end of year, I would say selling between 7.9 and 8.7 million consoles through to consumers is a fairly plausible and respectable sellthrough (obviously they have not sold all since shops are bulging with consoles). Correct me if I got something wrong. ... now if you want a serious example of numbers that don't add up try PS3 on nexgenwars.com. They claim 858,000 PS3s worldwide. We saw about 200k in NA during November. We saw about 400k in Japan until one week ago. Probably close to 500k now. Put it together, they are saying only 158k in NA in December which is completely outside of conceivable reality. nexgenwars.com is Microsoft FUD.
