| said: What exactly are the sales figures you used here, by the way? Are they NPD numbers, global sales, etc? I use VGC global sales as I use an average of amazon USA, Canada, France, Germany, UK and Japan for the charts.
Also, please forgive my inclusion of your charts. I know you wanted them deleted from our replies, but I wanted to comment on each one. No problem at all. What I meant was more : don't quote the complete post to say two words. To make a complete analysis, it's different...
PS4 This is, I think, the best match of them all. It really only misses one major sales spike, and it begins to trail off a little at the end, but it's otherwise quite representative of the overall trend. The first big sale spike is japanese launch. I guess the corresponding spike in points simply occured before I started doing those charts.
XBO Here, the Amazon numbers appear to anticipate the big sales spike, but then they fail to drop as sales decline. They remain fairly level, even rising a couple of times, while overall sales steadily decrease. They do eventually start to drop a little before shooting up again, apparently anticipating the second rise in sales. Overall, this one seems to do a good job of predicting sudden bursts in the market, but not so much at representing gradual changes. Totally agree. For information, first spike in points is titanfall bundle, second is kinectless and last one is XBO appearing in japanese list.
WiiU Hmm... I'm not quite sure what to make of this one. The Amazon figures start to rise well in advance of the actual sales spike, and then continue to rise after the spike has ended. It's not until the actual sales bottom out that the Amazon figures peak and begin to decrease. Shooting around the target a little, but overall, not bad. Amazon figures rising in advance is not surprising. As soon as an item appears on amazon people can start putting it in their wish list. For highly anticipated bundles/games, they are on the list a looooong time before their release. The early increase for WiiU before MK8 release is due to the bundle appearing early in "I don't remember which country" list. Concerning the points continuing to rise after the release of the game, I suspect Nintendo good E3 to be part of the explanation.
Don't be too hard on the 3DS chart. It actually correlates well trend-wise. And that's what I was interested to know - if Amazon was representative of overall trends. I honestly never expected the absolute numbers to match. I just wanted to know if Amazon could give you a snapshot of what the market is doing at any given time. Overall, I'm kind of surprised by how well it works. I realize this is just a small slice of the data, but based on what we have here, I have two major takeaways. First, it does seem that Amazon is at least somewhat representative of overall sales. And second, Amazon appears to be slightly predictive of sudden changes - big spikes (or big drops) in sales tend to be preceded by a sudden rise (or drop) in interest on Amazon. Again, this is all based on the admittedly small sample we have here, but assuming this data is all accurate, I don't think any of this is too unreasonable. And now that we know how the correlations look, it will be particularly interesting to see if these ideas hold up going forward. So, I hope you'll keep working on this because we'll get a better look at the big picture as more information comes in. You're off to a good start and I look forward to seeing how the data builds over time. Thanks for your work on this. |
Thank you for your interest in this. :)
