| cookingyourmama said: It is cherry picking when that one year is the exception to the rule and as well as that only one aspect of it is treated as a fact whilst the actual total number itself is just swept under the rug. The problem is you're just guessing at what the retailers thought and as well as that, at that point in time the 360's April-June average weekly sales had decreased from 98,000 to 79,000 from 2006 to 2007 yet the retailers still ordered a very high number leaving over 1.2 million on shelves which was a similar amount. The amount of days of supply in the retail chain when it comes to the 360 is all over the place, it's not very consistant at all and is a very poor method of trying to state as a fact what the next shipment will be and wether anything is over or undertracked. The next generation hasn't started yet and it won't start in the next quarter of sales either. On top of that the WiiU isn't going to magically save everything and the retailers know that the only way that they're going to have a good year is if the 360 and ps3 sell VERY well over the second half of the year. The retailers want the consoles to sell well and of course Microsoft is going to tell them "Yeah order loads, everybody is going to want our console, we've got all these great games coming out, price drops, special deals, yeah order loads" so for all you know that's what retailers are doing. |
You are actually the one who is ignoring significant data points. It isn't cherry-picking to pay attention to the entire sequence and attempt to understand the variations that occurred.
Why did retailers order so many Xbox 360s in mid-2007? Probably the same as why they ordered so many PS3s in late 2006 - misjudgment of the market. It's easy to misjudge the market early in the generation. Late in the generation, it becomes old faithful, it's hard to misjudge it.
I specifically noted that number of days in the supply chain is the wrong argument to use. A much healthier one is the actual total - and the total showed a distinct drop in 2011 - the question becomes "why?", and that's the question that you have failed to answer. Until you can provide an answer to that question that doesn't consist of ignoring it or just pretending that the variation for the entire generation has been big enough to include it (when all of the others were within about 0.1 million of each other, and this was 0.24 million below the next-smallest), you have failed to provide an argument for why it should be around 0.94+ million in order to be right.
I have provided a solid explanation for why it dropped in 2011 that is consistent with a prediction of 0.6-0.8 million in 2012. You have not provided a solid explanation for why it dropped in 2011, and your prediction for 2012 basically sums up to "somewhere between the limits we've seen so far", which is like seeing that you have the sequence 1,2,4,8, and predicting that the next number in the sequence will be somewhere between 1 and 8.
Meanwhile, you seem to think that retailers think like gaming community members. They don't. They're not going to order extra units of a console in the hopes that it will sell better as a result. They order based on how they judge the market, and the market for the 360 looks slower than it has been since 2007. You also seem to think that the retailers are going to listen to Microsoft hyping their system, and then not do any of their own research. Which games do you think are coming out for the 360 in the next 3 months, that would convince retailers that there'll be a boost to 360 sales? No, seriously, name a few, because the only one I'm aware of is Halo 4, and that's not out for another 19 weeks.
