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Seece on 15 December 2011
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postofficebuddy said:

As others have pointed out all this talk is kind of superfluous for now because potential adjustments can change things rather significantly. But here's something worth thinking about. PS3 was up 70% YOY in November NPD, 360 was up 20%. And we also know that PS3 is undertracked by about 200k in Aus/NZ since Sony said that Australian NPD had PS3 at 1.4 million a couple months ago. And in regards to the impact of the FFXIII-2 bundle, I don't think anyone expected it to boost PS3 to the same level as the FFXIII bundle did Famitsu are still expecting FFXIII-2 to sell 1 million this year.


Thanks to Sony giving a forecast we can determine everything from that and NPD.

Q4/Q1 expectations

MS are expecting growth in Europe, that's all we know on that front. So we use the 6.3 base figure from last Q4. They've had 400k growth in the US from Oct & Nov. That's 6.7 + whatever growth we see in Dec (which will be crucial). If it's only up the same amount it was from Nov - Dec transition last year, that's 2.2m, up 500k yoy, so 7.2. (again we know MS are expecting growth, that could be as low as 100k though. It could be as high as 3 mill, however, as the DS showed similar growth from Nov's passed - 1.7m Nov to 3m Dec and another similar year before (or after, can't remember)). I think most are expecting around 2.5m though. Which would be 7.5m.

Couldn't even begin to guess the growth in Europe and everywhere else in the world.

Another thing to note is the shortages they had last year, leading them to a much higher Q1 than they expected. Previous Q1's were around the 1.5m mark, this was 2.7, significantly higher. They were probably expecting growth even if they didn't suffer shortages over Q4/Q1, given Kinect/Slim. I don't think anymore than 2.1m though, that's up 600k yoy (over 25%) more than Q4 in % terms. Given they were selling what was put out in Q4 last year, and the stock in Q1 was used to refill the channel (I'd say 500/600k of Q1 was for that purpose) they will be shipping that in Q4 instead this year. We also don't know what potential X360 had to sell last Q4 due to the shortages. Let's say they did ship 600k in Q1 to refill the channels, with the other 2.1m being what they would have shipped anyway. If they had the opportunity to ship that in Q4, it would have been higher than 600k, because demand would have been there Vs. Q1.

Lots of variables to consider, we might see little to no growth in Europe/WW. Smaller than expected growth in NPD Dec 2m~ thus underperforming. Or we might see the opposite.

Regardless, with 400k growth so far, possibly 1.1m~ growth in Dec (max I'd say), growth in Europe, and refilling shelves in Q4 rather than Q1, I do wonder why people don't think it's possible. If all those stars alligned (which is just as likely to happen as it is to not happen) then that suggests a Q over 8.3m~, 800k over PS3's most likely max figure for Q4. (Unless Q1 next year is down YoY).

Now I'm not saying that's how it's gonna pan out, I expect somewhere in the middle, and it wouldn't be unsurprising to see MS falter on their promise. I still expect X360 to be ahead though.

Last Q4 they shipped the same, but the X360 was clearly the more in demand console WW, hence the shortages. Without those it would likely have cleared 7 mill. This Xmas you would expect similar amounts due to the PS3 cut spurring sales. But MS has proven they can be up YoY without a price cut.