| Lafiel said: uhm.. the christmas quarter is the stronges sales wise for .. obvious reasons, so it makes sense more consoles are sold than shipped in that quarter, right? btw, retailers often start to prepare for holiday in summer (or so I heard), so quite a few orders probably were made in calendar quarter 3
well the 360 definitely isn't undertracked right now - according to VGC data there were only 300k units not sold at the end of the year, which frankly is unbelieveably low (for comparison PS3 had 1.6million "on shelves" and Wii ~1m according to VGC) |
Were people not paying attention to sales in November and December. 360 was sold out a portion of December so bad that MS had to grab newly manufactured units and airship them. So the 300K units makes perfect sense. Sony did not have that problem and honestly how many 360s does MS have to have in Japan at any given time. They sell less than 5000 per week. MS could get by having 20,000 in retail channel in Japan at any given time. Sony would certainly have had 10 times that amount in Japan at any given time. Particulary at the end of the year with Japan holiday sales peaking in early January. Sony sold over 200K consoles in Japan the 1st couple of weeks in 2010 and retailers would expect similiar sales in 2011. Retailers in EMEAA, NA, and Japan all had to keep PS3 supplies at a good level. That isnt the case for the 360 where only NA and EMEAA would need to be in good supply and due to MS miscalculation 360 was underproduced resulting in sellouts. I actually wouldnt be surprised at all if PS3 was in fact overtracked a bit.
Q1 numbers will clear this up as MS gets 360 stock back up to the levels retailers are happy with and Sony balances out where consoles should be. I expect MS to ship close to a million more than Sony this current quarter.
Its libraries that sell systems not a single game.
