X1 Free Game promotion was a success in the USA.

[binary solo]

cpg716 said:

 

USA Hardware by Platform

 

Platform	Weekly (change)	Total
PS4	162,354	(+262%)	4,271,618
XOne	105,437	(+208%)	3,371,776

I would call the free game with X1 promotion in America a success. For a GAME that was supposed to sell PS4 consoles there was only 57k difference. I am really surprised by this. I really thought with how high the Destiny PS4 Bundle had been on Amazon that it would have been a miniumum of 100k.  The 227k difference in software sales between versions is more in line with my expectations. Although..   X1/X360 sales were only 27k behind PS4/PS3 sales. The X360 version outsold the PS3 by 200k.

Anyone else surprised by this?

How about some maths to put things into the right proportion, and of course to show that you are in fact wrong to be surprised that the gap is only (!?!) 57k.

Lifetime PS4:Xb one = 1.26:1

Destiny sales PS4:Xb one also 1.26:1

Hardware sales for the destiny luanch week PS4:Xb one = 1.54:1

Week on week hardware boost for PS4 = 262%

Week on week hardware boost for Xb one = 208%

PS4 got a bigger boost, from a higher starting point than Xb one.

What does that mean? That means PS4 did better out of the hardware boost than Xb one both in absolute and relative terms. Quite how that translates to Xb one seeing success from its free games promotion I don't know. You'll have to present some other data which mathematically demonstrates how Xb one did relatively better than PS4. But all I see is PS4 doing relatively better than Xb one by all metrics.

Due to the fact that, according to VGC software which we all know is very inaccurate but we'll use it because we have ntohing else to go by, Destiny games sold exactly in proportion to LTD hardware sales you would expect, all things being equal, for the console sales for the week to also reflect this proportion. So if we made Xb one the baseline with 105K, then that 1.26:1 ratio should have put PS4 at ~132K. But PS4 got 162K. If we use PS4 as the high mark with 162K then that 1.26:1 ratio means Xb one should have sold, all things being equal, 128K. But Xb one sold 105K

So depending on your point of view, either PS4 did better than it otherwise would have (hello white Destiny bundle increasing PS4's hardware sales by 30K beyond what a level playing field would reasonably be expected to achieve). Or Xb one did worse than it should have, because not only did it fail to sell in the same proportion as the current LTD, it sold significantly below that LTD proportion.

To me it's clear: Destiny white bundle pushed quite a lot of hardware; Xb one free game did little to nothing and Xb one sold pretty much in line with what you would expect for an 860K game launch.

This seems like a fairly poor attempt to talk up Xb one and talk down PS4 when the objective data suggests the opposite.