360 over-tracked!!!!!!

[koffieboon]

Squilliam said:

koffieboon said:

Squilliam said:
Oh yeah the Xbox 360 software numbers are undertracked by a little over 30M!

Anyway another reason to add to the above is that retailers are more fiscally conservative, which means they order fewer consoles and hold fewer in stock due to the reccession which really only hit us at the end of last year and the start of this year, remember?

It also helps to explain why certain Wii games may have struggled first week as retailers ordered too few copies.

It is actually more likely a sign that numerous 360 titles are overtracked. First of all there will be huge amounts of unsold software at any moment in time, worldwide I wouldn't be surprised if we're talking about 10s of millions of copies for any of the platforms. Then there are enough smaller titles that don't get tracked in every region. If those numbers are added it would raise the software totals considerably. Combined those numbers are likely bigger than the difference in software totals and shipment numbers. And for reference, Wii software totals at April 4 were at 288 million, while shipment numbers were at 353 million for the end of March, a difference of 65 million!

The Wii has a lot more software SKUs than the Xbox 360, and if you consider the number of games released for each platform and the software sales pattern with the Xbox 360 sales being relatively front loaded in comparison to the Wii, you'll see that the Wii has more software on the shelf at any point in time than the Xbox 360. The other thing to consider is that its possible that the Wiis software is also undertracked as a lot of games go under-reported or sell say 100k and then disappear from the shelves.

I don't try to argue that 360 software should see a gap of 65 million as well, I just wanted to show an example which makes the 30 million number seem a lot smaller than it seems at first sight. Also I highly doubt the higher amount of SKUs will make a big difference between the 2 platforms, since many of those SKUs might not even be carried by most retailers, and if they do carry them it will only be in very small quantities. And as far as sales being frontloaded goes, that could work against stock levels just as easily. If those titles bomb there will be a lot more excess stock. In the end just checking stores to compare the amount of shelvespace might actually give a far better view of the amount of software in the wild.

Also when looking at 360 software sales, don't forget there is a huge gap in the software sales in 2006 in Others. It is at only 1 million at the end of 2006, while they already sold 2.55 million consoles at that point in time.