So, a couple days ago we had a thread about this article about the 2013 hardware sales in the UK. The data from that article didn't line up very well with vgchartz numbers at all, especially with hardware numbers actually being 5% up instead of 16% down as vgchartz shows it.
I then looked around the net and sure enough I found more than enough evidence indicating that the UK is way overtracked here.
1. October 2012 the PS3 reached 5 mil in the UK. At this point vgchartz had the PS3 close to 5.3 mil
2. June 2013 the 360 was close to outsell the Wii with 8.4 mil units in the UK. Vgchartz at that point: 360 at 8.95 mil and the Wii at 8.7 mil
Ok, the UK numbers are overtracked, good to know but what are the real numbers? That's the great thing, we have pretty much all the things we need to quite accurately say what the 2012 and 2013 numbers really are.
We know what the PS4 and X1 sold in 2013: 530k and 364k
We know thanks to the original article, how much every console was down/up:
- 3DS (including 2DS, XL) - up 4 per cent
- Xbox 360 - down 30.7 per cent
- PS4
- PS3 - down 31 per cent
- Xbox One
- Vita - down 41 per cent
- Wii U - up 41.5 per cent
- Wii - down 72 per cent
that the sales overall were up 5%, what outsold what and that the PS4+X1 made up about 1/3 of all hardware sales of 2013
We know thanks to Nintendo and Neogaf what the market share in 2012 was:
Percent3DS 23.13
NDS 2.8
WII 7.09
WIU 3.17
PSP 2.61
PSV 10.07
PS3 22.39
360 28.54
And now the important one, we know that the 360 outsold the PS4, but that it was very close.
This means the 360 this year sold more than but close to 530k units. From this we can make a very close assumption about last and this years sales, for this I will now assume that the 360 sold 535k this year (important! this is an educated guess, but still not necessarily 100% correct)
From these 535k 360s sold, the 30,7% it dropped in 2013 and the 2012 market share, we get these rounded hardware numbers for 2012:
| "real" Numbers | Vgchartz | Difference | |
| X360 | 772,000 | 1,140,000 |
+368,000 |
| 3DS | 626,000 | 900,000 | +274,000 |
| PS3 | 606,000 | 868,000 | +262,000 |
| Wii | 192,000 | 292,000 | +100,000 |
| PSV | 272,000 | 288,000 | +16,000 |
| PSP | 71,000 | 132,000 | +61,000 |
| DS | 76,000 | 102,000 | +26,000 |
| Wii U | 86,000 | 97,000 | +11,000 |
| Overall | 2,700,000 | 3,819,000 | +1,119,000 |
From this it's easy to get 2013 numbers:
| "real" Numbers | Vgchartz | Difference | |
| 3DS | 651,000 | 737,000 | +86,000 |
| X360 | 535,000 | 563,000 | +28,000 |
| PS4 | 530,000 | 531,000 | +1,000 |
| PS3 | 418,000 | 494,000 | +76,000 |
| XOne | 364,000 | 369,000 | +5,000 |
| PSV | 160,000 | 149,000 | -11,000 |
| WiiU | 120,000 | 128,000 | +8,000 |
| Wii | 54,000 | 81,000 | +27,000 |
| PSP | - | 26,000 | - |
| DS | - | 14,000 | - |
| Overall | 2,832,000 | 3,092,000 | 220,000 |
Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a market share table for 2011, so I couldn't figure out what each system sold then, but thanks to this article, I am able to assume that all console together sold about 4,036,000 units, compared to Vgchartz' 5,300,000.
The best thing about my "real" numbers is that they all work out. The order of the consoles is right, consoles are up 5% in 2013 and the PS4+X1 make up about 1/3 of all consoles sold (about 31,5%).
So what do you think? Did I make a mistake somewhere or do my numbers sound reasonable?
