360 Numbers don't add up!

[ICStats]

Monty said: Stromprophet said: M$ has shipped a ton of unsold consoles. I'll give you one evidence. Blue Dragon shipment to Japan. They had over 100,000 consoles available for that deal at launch and they sold what 30,000? 35,000? That 100,000 was in addition to what they already ship there monthly. That's way over what they actually were able to sell in Japan in December. Right now it is a marketing tactic for M$, and they are trying to inflate their numbers. Just like Nintendo will, and Sony will too once both of those stop selling out when they make shipments. They will ship more than there is demand for and start saying they have shipped or sold that many. You obviously have absolutely no grasp of how shipped/sold works. MS can not ship a console unless it is ordered by a store. MS can't just start shipping consoles to Best Buy as a "marketing tactic" to up its numbers. And even if they could, it would be a stupid tactic as at some point they aren't going to be able to ship anymore as the market was too flooded. This "tactic" wouldn't last long at all, and in the end would kick a company in the rear end when they quit selling/shipping consoles altogether due to oversaturation. MS counts its "sold" units when they leave their control and is "sold" to a retailer. MS has their money, and to them it is a "sold" console. A retailer only buys a console from MS when it feels it has a need to have that console. This is how all the video game companies do it... Nintendo, Sony, MS... all of them count a sold console this way. To them, that's all they can track, and really all they are concerned with... it's their bottom line. To put it another way, a console company can NOT just rent a warehouse in the desert and stack it full of 10 million consoles and count them as "sold". It's not the way the system works, and in the end it would be a terrible tactic for a company.

Although that may count as "sold" for Microsoft, it doesn't even come close to how much is sold through to the consumer. There are easily 1 to 2 million 360 consoles in just sitting in warehouses or on shelves. Just think how many points of sale there are in the world (hundreds of thousands) and they all have many 360 consoles in stock. We count sales to consumers here, which is what NPD and Meta Create and Chart Track and all tracking companies in the world track. MS claims they sold 10.4 million... great for them, but that doesn't say anything about how much was sold to consumers.