October 2014 NPD Thread!

[Burek]

Here is my opinion on the two issues at hand:

1.) Leaks -- It is somewhat silly of Aquamarine to try and prevent numbers from exiting the GAF forums. It would be understandable if GAF were a small, enclosed community. But GAF is known as the largest gaming forum in the world. I might be wrong, but I've read data of over 100K members. So, by obscuring the numbers, you still have 100K people that can see them. Not only VGC members, but also members of other forums, journalists, tradesmen, researchers, students etc. etc. To think that none of those 100K members will use the data for their own purposes is really strange.
Of course, the issue then is two-pronged:
a.) Aquamarine obviously likes attention. Surely that in a month of his/her ban, he/she would have found a better way to disseminate the numbers, either by PMs to the moderators, PMs to a selected group, forming a small, invitation only forum etc. But no, GAF and 100K+ audience is still the best choice. The fear of getting caught is certainly much smaller than the joy of being in the spotlight.
b.) Also, GAF ownership definitely profits from those leaks, as it gets extra memberships and an undivided attention from the press, thus not being in their interest to have AM go away. A mutually beneficial arrangement.
Therefore, I doubt that we will stop getting the numbers, no matter how many times they are leaked outside GAF.


2.) Sales, XOne sales in particular --- VGC overtracked by 50K. While it would be simpler to chalk that overtracking to the last week, the truth is probably somewhere in between -- minor overtrackings throughout the month, with a major 30-35K overtrack in week 4.
Week 4 was probably over because of the algorhythm giving too much significance to a Sunset bundle. Sunset was overtracked as well, so it is understandable where the error might have occured.
This error then led to major overtracking in Nov. Week 1, as MS's statement was used with erroneous numbers. Also, MS's PR was very vague, leading us to believe that they won Oct. Week 4, while in all actuality it was just referring to the 10 days of discounts.
It is reasonable to assume so, because the price-cut bundles were announced in Week 4, and Sunset is by no means a must-have-now game that would entice gamers not to wait 5 days for a $50 discount. Thus Oct Week 4 dropped a bit from the prediction, backloading the Nov Week 1+ (Nov 2 -Nov 12 MS announcement), giving them a 200%+ jump, but to about 200K, not almost 300K. Enough to win over Sony, definitely, but nowhere close to the total domination we were led to assume.