| DerNebel said: The thing is you're speculating here, the Wii U and X1 might be mistracked but we don't know. We do in fact know that the PS4 is undertracked, because even if Sonys numbers are internal estimates, they are still way more accurate than Vgchartz numbers and I doubt that they'd lie about something like that on stage. Also the Wii U has a much higher probability of actually being overtracked, seeing that Vgchartz has the system at over 6.54 million units at the end of June with just 6.67 million units shipped, which puts it at less than 130k units stock or about 2 weeks at the rate vgchartz is saying the Wii U is selling at, don't know about you, but I find that a little unrealistic. X1 might be undertrracked, but we really have nothing to go on here. And yes I was averaging, I know, but think about it, there were only 2 big games that could really move systems released in that window, Watch Dogs and TLOU:R, how much can we seriously have undertracked those weeks? The baseline of the PS4 has to be considerably higher than what this site is showing at the moment. |
Of course I'm speculating. That's what everybody here is doing. We don't have solid, undoubtable numbers. And as for Sony, I wouldn't put it past them in terms of lying on stage, when there's no way for them to get caught and their statement serves as very good PR for them. Also note that they said, on August 12th, that they'd hit 10 million by August 10th... how on earth could they get sufficiently accurate numbers within just two days, when even the dedicated market-tracking companies require weeks at least to get their data?
Also, the window also contained Wolfenstein: The New Order (over 300k sold in week 1), MLB 14 The Show (200k in week 1), and EA Sports UFC (230k in week 1). Not as significant as Watch_Dogs, sure, but still definitely big enough to impact sales... and yet, no such boost was observed for any of them. Heck, Watch_Dogs sold 1.6 million copies in week 1 on PS4, yet only boosted PS4 sales by 58% (about 60k), according to VGChartz. Perhaps these are the places that it was undertracked, and actual PS4 sales are at around 9.7 million rather than 10 million - I could certainly see Sony fudging the numbers that far in order to make the announcement at Gamescom rather than just via press release.
And no, the baseline doesn't have to be "considerably higher". You can argue that you consider the baseline being higher to be the most plausible argument, but it's not the only possibility. And that's my point - we don't have enough information to conclude what has "really" happened, we can only speculate, using the information that we do have.
Also, I could certainly see the Wii U stock being about 2 weeks off sold-out at any point right now. Retailers have, on the whole, been wary of stocking the Wii U in large quantities since the great slowdown of 2013. So when MK8 released and sales boosted, retailers probably kept ordering a few weeks worth of current sales numbers in advance, anticipating a slowdown that never came. And with no notable games releasing for a couple of months after that point, there was no reason for them to stock up in anticipation of another rush. So 130k left on shelves does seem entirely plausible to me.
