April 2014 NPD Thread!

[Arkaign]

I think things are even worse for Microsoft than we realize.

They must have paid an insane amount of money for Titanfall. The bundled digital copies didn't come free of charge, only an idiot would believe that. Combine that with paying the retailers to make up for the discounted $449 bundle pricing, and the HUGE marketing push. It was inescapable everywhere you went. So Titanfall costs alone were probably WELL into the hundreds of millions considering all aspects of it.

Then on the production side of things, Nov/Dec gave them confidence most likely to continue production at maximum levels, meaning that what, 1M+ excess inventory was generated rather quickly with nowhere to push it through the channel after long? So then you are stuck with warehouses full of XB1s (with Kinect, no less), and then the retailers/distributors themselves drowning in castles of XB1s, all the way to CostCos/etc, with castles of XB1s sitting there all lonely, hoping for a buyer to rescue them from their cardboard prisons.

The financial mistake of overproduction can be catastrophic, if it gets bad enough that you have to restructure the contracts with the likes of Foxconn/distribution/etc.

And then the rushed-forward news of the $399 SKU and Halo 5 (for 2015!! over a year away!!) out of the E3 to buffer the terrible April NPD release, it just bodes poorly all around. If May is sub 100k (it will be), and June is another sizable loss to PS4 (it will be), then I think Spencer goes into full war mode. They HAVE to.

Mark my words, $399 will not move the needle beyond a week, two at best.

$349, or even $299 bundle with a AAA game, that's the ticket to relevance. It WILL happen before 2015. The only question is when. If they don't do it, they're dead. If they wait too long, they're dead.

Inertia in the modern socially-connected gamer world is the most valuable thing in the world. Already across the country, groups of gaming friends are already steadily switching from previous X360/XBL dominance to PS4/PS+ dominance. And the greater the gap, the more difficult it is to climb that wall.