PS4 and ONE. The wisdom of 33 countries versus 13.

[DonFerrari]

Fei-Hung said:
We will also never know if the opposite is true as we can't go back in time and see the opposite happen. Also the variables are many and it is not just about number of units and country's to launch in, it is also about demand, strength of your brand, marketing, investing in markets that have a potential to be big players in the future.

Few more things to contemplate:

1) if it is worth launching in those few extra countries due to demand, is it still wrong?

2) to be able to make a powerful statement saying we are better prepared than our competitor and this is why we can serve gamers everywhere sooner wrong to?

3) did they ship large enough numbers to the smaller launch countries to really make such a difference? Eg if those countries only got 1000-5000 units each, compared to the UK and USA getting 10k-50k each.

4) having sold sooner rather than later in emerging markets or smaller markets could have led to an increase in sell through to customers due to hype generated at launch. Would that still be considered a negative?

There are many variables and like you said all we have are opinions. I guess we will never know until Doc Brown does his business

If you go through all over the thread most of those points were discussed.

1) For PS4 it certainly were since they got a head start and kept all markets interested and with "out of supply" notion (while still selling all the inventoire). For MS not sure if releasing would bring much benefit, but by not releasing they basically already lost by default and will have quite smaller marketshare than they could have.

2) Didn't understood... but possible a cheap shot from Sony to have media attention? It seem to have worked so far, not that I agree with all of them.

3) Small numbers for all that we know, but that secured the market for basically the whole gen and maybe foment the next gen by *sony remembered us and made a ww release while MS dumped us to 2nd or 3rd category*... From Kowen and etho estimatives (which I agree) 100-200k units were probably all they needed to cover the 20 extra countries during 2013 launch. And Sony getting another 100-200k in USA (which would make the diff go from 750 to 850-950, don't think that would be made or if it could pass it, but we already have stock and X1 seems to have stole little from it) would just give it like 5% more marketshare there while it already got 100% marketshare in 20 countries that during the gen will probably stay over 80% because of the early release.

4) I think that is positive.. and seeing that PS2 sold almost 60M after gen 7 started and that a lot of that came from emerging countries we can see how much sony value that and how much that brings to the brand.