| Aielyn said: 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. |
I don't believe that a company would tell such a straight up lie on stage at Gamescom, Sony could have stayed ambiguous, could have stated a simple shipped number for example, the fact that they deliberately went out of their way to even specify "yes, we mean sold to customers", leads me to believe that they're not lying here, sure those numbers are still internal estimates, but I'd say that they are extremely close.
And yes it is just by far the most plausible explanation that the baseline is considerably higher, the couple games releasing in that quarter actually making up boosts of that magnitude seems pretty unlikely, I think the tracking being off in Europe and the Rest of the World, something that has been proven time and time again, on a weekly basis seems like a more plausible explanation.
Regarding the Wii U, I would disagree, but at this point in time neither you nor I have real tangible proof for our standpoints, so it seems pretty unnecessary to dicuss this.
