WW Up!

[binary solo]

DirtyP2002 said:

The Xbox 360 slim released 8 weeks ago. Since then it sold more than 1.75 million consoles. Before the Slim release, sales were about 80k a week --> So without the slim the Xbox 360 would have sold about 650k. So 1.1 million more Xbox 360 were sold than usual.

So you guys really think there were 1.1 million Xbox 360 owners upgrading? Sounds like nonsense.

I'd say it would be the other way around. 1.1 million new 360 owners and 650K upgraders. It's silly to think that a new designed console a phat clearance sale isn't going to attract significantly more new 360 owners than in the weeks prior to the 360s phat clearance sale. And I don't recall anyone claiming that the entirety of the post 360s boost is due to upgraders. People were suggesting that a substantial number of 360s buyers were upgraders, and there's validity to that claim.

In a discussion like this the tie ratio actually serves a purpose in suggesting the approximate proportion of upgraders. In the proportions you suggest as being what certain people think, assuming the alleged 1.1 million upgraders are buying few or no games, the "true" tie ratio relative to the 650K new 360 buyers would be about 14.5. Clearly a ridiculous notion. 360's LTD tie ratio is 8.76 at the moment, down from 8.86 the week before slim launched. That's quite a substantial drop over such a short period of time.  The tie ratio for that 8 week period is a miniscule (for the 360) 5.49. Now there's no way you can convince me that new 360 buyers are buying games in greater numbers than normal, yet the overall weekly tie ratio is substantially lower than normal.

Much more believable is if the new 360 buyers are buying roughly the same number of games. But there's a large enough number of upgraders who are not buying games to have a significant effect on the tie ratio (both the 8 week tie ratio and the LTD tie ratio). If we put the new 360 buyer number up at about 1.1 million as an estimate, with 650K being upgraders, then the tie ratio for that 1.1 million is about ~8.7. That seems pretty close to being right. So the upgrader % seems to be about 35-37% of weekly sales, or 59% of the boost over the 8 week pre-360s sales.

So, you produced some good figures there, almost correctly guessing at the number of upgraders without actually meaning to. You're an accidental genius!