April 2014 NPD Thread!

[naruball]

Kasz216 said:

naruball said:

SoftHimbeer said:
So how does VGChartz always overtrack the X1 so much?
Im pretty sure it will be below 100k in May but VGChartz will probably have 3 times the amount for some weird reason.

PS4 is doing good - Especially with the thin lineup they currently have.
There is a 100k difference - They won't need to fear the official 400$ X1 at all

There were similar complaints a few years back when Source was around. It seems that the wii was overtracked month after month. It was actually kind of funny, cuz people would play "how much will the wii be overtracked this month" games. It's understandable if it happens a couple of times, but not several months in a row. There's a problem with their sources and need to adjust them. Or whatever they were gonna predict that xb1 sold for a week, deduct 30% just to be closer to what the numbers will look like according to NPD.

Source as far as I know didn't actually do anything with the official numbers.  Just the Japanese preorder and early look numbers and such.

 

As for why the Xbone is constantly being overtacked, if I had to hazard a real guess, as opposed to what seems like accusations that someone is jeopardizing the website they are trying to make a career on for corporate bias....

 

Just look at the Xbone on that list earlier.   Huge unprecedented launch, and then a huge dropoff.   When you are tracking the sales of a product, basically the thing to do is figure out what percentage of the product your data set sells on average.

 

This is a hard thing to adjust when it's selling up and down like crazy like the Xbone.   This is espeically a problem as sales go from "Sold out stock" to "Normal levels" because the percentage of sales almost undoubtly changes.

Chances are, the stores Ioi stocks originally looked like a much higher percentage of total sales, then they've ended up being currently, and it's hard to tell if it's been due to stock bumps and minuses/sales/or some other factor.

 

It's likely to have a couple more rough months even if he nails it down now, as the Kinectless SKU may change the Xbox's consumer base... and in doing so, change it's consumer percentages for retailers.

Oh, ok. My bad. I thought the source was in charge of analysizing and prediting data. I do remember, however, that whenever he would write a sales prediction article, he would always overstimate the sales of wii and people would complain about it. This got so out of hand that at some point he even asked the community if they still want him to make predictions considering all the criticism. 

I understand how difficult it must be to get xb1 sales right especially considering all the variables, but, if something is clearly not working, something needs to be done. At the very least contact people like Ben who deal with many sales and might get a better idea of what's going on.