Generation is winding down folks. US has 105 million households or so, but 90m consoles have sold through already. Passing 10% penetration of the total US population is usually a pretty good indication sales will wane for any given hardware - currently that's 30.5 (305m / 10). The rumors of new consoles exist because Sony / Microsoft are making less money on their platforms than before - all those retail discounts and price cuts aren't boosting the bottom line now even if they push a bit of hardware or sustain it. Imagine if X360 & PS3 have to be sold at $150-$250 next year to match / come close to figures in late 2011 and you can see why new machines are suddenly a decent investment.
Part of the reason I thought about, but ultimately didn't edit in monetary figures into Seb's article is that everything just looked really high in our data, and the monetary figures would have been high by like at least $500m (which is damn high for just a hardware error). It became especially suspicious when Nintendo claimed 4.5m plus Wiis - no more than 1-1.4m in Dec. In what month has X360 ever beaten Wii more than 80-100%? There might be some, but off the top of my head its been more like by 50-75% recently, which was in line with December. So in retrospect that was actually an important piece of data that we all kind of ignored.
I didn't think we were off by 1m plus on X360 mind you, but I didn't see any reason for it to shoot up in December - Kinect demand fell off vs. 2010, BF week was abnormally huge, 960,000 X360s in a week is about the best you can do in the US market in a week, but the temporary $150 price point vanished in December (went back to $200 - still damn cheap for a Kinect w/ 360 bundle) and no major games came out after mid-November for X360 or PS3.
As a side note, this is the first time since 2005 I don't remember seeing any hardware sell out anywhere in the US, so what NPD has does match my experiences at retail in December. it doesn't surprise me that it reflects national trends either, given unemployment is exceptionally low here for how bad everything is globally.
People are difficult to govern because they have too much knowledge.
When there are more laws, there are more criminals.
- Lao Tzu
