Alright my long and antic
ipated prediction at this is finally here. First I'd like to go over my predictions last time around. These where my rough tolerance ranges for the 3 last year at the end of that 10 week span:
Wii- 18-18.5 million
360- 14.7-15.2 million
PS3- 7.0-7.5 million
Actual was this:
Wii- 19.65 million
360- 16.00 million
PS3- 9.16 million
Luckily it showed a similar trend. On Wii I was off by 7.6%, 360 by 6.4%, and PS3 by 20.9%. It's obvious I underestimated the holiday season. I think a year or 2 ago those numbers might have been spot on with the holidays but 2007 holiday season was obviously a lot larger. So Wii and 360 were actually not that bad prediction wise although still off by around 1 to 1.5 million. PS3 prediction was not so hot. Why? I underestimated 2 things. One the successfulness of the 40 GB PS3 which actually became the dominant version. Broke trends of the "cheaper"/weaker SKU being more dominant than the more expensive/"stronger" SKU. Took me by surprise. I also underestimated the power of a platform in its first holiday season without severe shortages or under shipments.
Thus in my next prediction I'll try not to make the same mistakes although it is always possible I will haha. Anyways not bad if I do say so myself considering they weren't random guesses haha.
Now this year's 10 week countdown starts with the week beginning October 26, 2008. That is of course the beginning of next week. However we only have sales that are currently up to October 10, 2008. Meaning even though numbers are coming in within the next 2 days to help my guessing game I guess I'm going to have to do it myself. Currently here's the status of the 3:
- Wii- 33.41 million
- 360- 21.44 million
- PS3- 15.90 million
So far this year this is how much they've sold:
- Wii- 13.76 million
- 360- 5.44 million
- PS3- 6.74 million
For the most part sales this year of the 3 have been pretty good even compared to last year and last year's holiday season was monumentally better than most holiday seasons before it. So this is something to note when I underestimated holiday sales last year it might be good to overestimate holiday sales this year. But anyways we need to find where the sales will be at the day before week beginning on Oct 26, 2008. I'm not going really give it huge thought considering if I'm off on these 2 weeks chances are it'd only effect my overall prediction by about 200k tops which wouldn't effect percentages too much. So judging by sales the last couple of weeks and obvious rising sales that these will be the numbers by the time we hit the week starting Oct 26, 2008:
- Wii- 34.20 million
- 360- 21.80 million
- PS3- 16.25 million
I wanted to have them all evened out but couldn't find a decent way to do that with PS3 so deal with it haha. I'll even it out in one of the weeks so that we get nice clean numbers. Remember not going for pinpoint accuracy so those 10k numbers really don't mean much. I don't mind being off by 90k haha. Now Twroo has provided in the first post all the major events that happen on each week for all platforms so that I don't have to explain most of my things so I'll get straight into a table that hopefully everyone can follow considering I'm not too good at creating all this stuff:
| Wii | PS3 | 360 | |
| Wk 1 | 400,000 | 225,000 | 200,000 |
| Wk 2 | 450,000 | 350,000 | 350,000 |
| Wk 3 | 500,000 | 350,000 | 300,000 |
| Wk 4 | 550,000 | 375,000 | 350,000 |
| Wk 5 | 1,050,000 | 550,000 | 500,000 |
| Wk 6 | 1,000,000 | 500,000 | 450,000 |
| Wk 7 | 1,550,000 | 550,000 | 550,000 |
| Wk 8 | 2,250,000 | 850,000 | 800,000 |
| Wk 9 | 1,400,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 |
| Wk 10 | 650,000 | 400,000 | 300,000 |
| Total | 9,800,000 | 4,650,000 | 4,300,000 |
| Lifetime Total | 44,000,000 | 20,900,000 | 26,100,000 |
Considering Wii is in the first column we'll discuss it first. Wii I'd think for me took the most time to come up with a set of numbers that worked with me. Went through about 20 different scenarios until I chose the best one. I had first tried to use trends from Wii in 2007 during the Holidays but I quickly understood why this wouldn't work. Just different considering Wii was mostly sold out during that time while it won't be so much this time. Thus I used most of my trends from either PS2 a few holiday seasons ago and DS in 2007 to come up with a set of numbers that worked the best. Most difficult week has to be Wk 9 considering usually it isn't a strong week but it includes some of the biggest shopping days in the world this time around... more so than last year. Thus it's going to be a little stronger this year.
PS3 was a little bit easier of course still difficult. Most of its trends are just looking at last year but on a slight increase overall. Taking into fact the increases taht will happen with the big games releasing such as Resistance 2 and LBP and later White Knight Story I'm thinking this year I won't have underestimated like I did last year with it.
360 trends had to ahve been the easiest to predict considering a lot of the regions are easy to predict. America may have proven though the most difficult to calculate in surprisingly. I really only had to make a few revisions. 360 is going to go into the these 10 weeks assumedly ahead of PS3 but PS3's big guns all release around the openings of these weeks so it's its not going to be able to top it for almost all of the holidays but will play right underneath it for pretty much the entire time. 360's biggest gun of course is Gears of War 2 which will of course be the one that helps it stay around PS3.
Ultimately this holiday in my opinion is going to be monumentally bigger than last year. Only platform that probably won't see it being as big is DS but this could be its peak year but doubtful. While Wii will take the place of DS in America from last year as having similar trends, PS3 and 360 will just start to move up at a specific percentage in the world. Also a lot of my data is counting that PSP 3000, DSi, and games like Animal Crossing will indeed cause the Japanese market to be huge this holiday season giving extra sales for everyone. However most of my increases are coming from the region that is Europe/Other. DS has opened this market up enough to not only support itself and Wii but I think increased sales for PS3 and 360.
So these are mine let's hope I'm closer this year haha.
