BLACK FRIDAY - Will PS3 hit hard?

[NJ5]

papflesje said:

NJ5 said:

papflesje said:

Hmm, I would think that there would be more money available (or willingness to fork it over, seeing how you'd be getting more bang for your buck) than in non-holiday season tbh. Would seem odd the other way around. I'd think people would hoard their money during the year and be a little more lenient towards the end of the year.

As I said, we're not talking about the same demographics during the holidays vs during the year. So it's not as easy as that.

 

Do explain the difference then.

Imho, the ones who spend during the year are a different demographic to the ones saving for purchases during holiday periods. The latter has saved up quite a bit and will want value for their spending, looking more for the best deal, not per say the cheapest deal imho.

People who buy consoles during the year are most likely buying them for themselves. People who buy them in the holidays are most likely giving a gift to someone else (in the case of consoles I suspect it's mostly parents giving to kids).

That's a pretty big difference in terms of demographics. The people who are buying a console for themselves are more likely to take into account lots of things other than price. Parents buying a console for their kids are IMO more likely to care about the price, as they're usually buying lots of gifts at the same time, and they don't know the other pros and cons of each console very well.

If you want an example of this effect in action, look at Nov-Dec 2008 sales compared to the two months before that for each console:

VGChartz Hardware data for the period 02nd Nov 2008 to 27th Dec 2008:

Console	Wii	PS3	X360
Total	8,496,086	2,894,437	4,577,371

VGChartz Hardware data for the period 31st Aug 2008 to 01st Nov 2008:

Console	Wii	PS3	X360
Total	3,202,733	1,330,790	1,689,018

 

As you can see the Wii and 360 had a 170% boost in the holidays, while the PS3 had a 117% boost.