| binary solo said: (1) Software on Amazon is a very different and highly unreliable beast compared to hardware. Amazon has been very poor at predicting the NPD top 10, and as you've pointed out very poor at predicting the highest selling sku of any given multiplat game. The fact that Amazon has been 100% at calling PS4 vs Xb1 since Dec '13 suggests there's something different going on with hardware. I don't think you can necessarily or easily extrapolate software buying trends to hardware. It is possible (or rather likely) that the PS demographic does tend to prefer to buy software online instead of brick and mortar, which may or may not be an age related thing. But it is also possible that the PS and Xb demographics both have similar online vs. bricks and mortar preferences when it comes to buying the consoles themselves. Indeed Amazon's 100% reliability outside of the launch month for hardware and poor reliability for software in every month does suggest the hardware buying preferences are more even between the console demographics. (2)There is something just a bit more satisfying in buying a piece of hardware by handing over the cash (or the card) and getting that immediate satisfaction of having the console in your hot hands right away. I don't think age plays so much of a role in that, because people like that warm rush of excitement and satisfaction with having a nice new electronic gadget in the hands no matter how old they are. (3)The other interesting stat is that the closest the 2 consoles have ever been on Amazon was Dec 2013. That month the gap was only 4 placings in Xb one's favour, and with PS4 selling 860-ish K and Xb one selling ~900K the gap was just over 40K. Sure that's the same gap as January with the gap being 9 places. But as a % of sales it was only ~2.5% difference. As opposed to the January situation where the difference was 20%. In some ways it seems like Amazon's rankings do reasonably reflect the market share situation. I also think you are reading how the amazon rankings work wrongly. There is no basis to a claim that the gaps at higher rankings will necessarily be larger. That is pure speculation. I have no problem believing the difference between 9th and 18th is 250/day in a month when PS4 only sells 192K nation-wide and is the 9th ranked item on Amazon and Amazon has 15-20% of the hardware market. If Amazon only sold 38K PS3's for the whole month and that was good enough to rank 9th then relatively small gaps from 9 to 18 are not unreasonable. There is no homogineity to the sales ranks. The gap between 1 and 2 could be single digits, and the gap between 5 and 6 could be over 20,000. I think the conclusion you can draw is the higher the absolute number of sales, the bigger the gape is likely to be between ranks. But in months where sales a fairly low the gap between ranks can be very small indeed, even in the top 10 / 20. If you do an analysis of Amazon monthly ranks between PS4 and Xb one, and the NPD gap both numerically and % there might be some interesting conclusions that we can draw. But right now I don;t think the facts you're drawing on suggest antyhing other than when the Amazon ranking gap narrows, so does the NPD gap. (4)And in all likelyhood when the gap narrrows to just a few placings the correlation between Amazon and NPD will probably collapse. But that does not obviously have anything to do with buyer habits and demographics, it's just a statistical relatity that when the difference between samples is small the predictive value of the result the samples are suggesting is low unbless the sample size is very large as a proportion of the total population. Basic statistics. (5)Until Xb one beats PS4 in NPD in a month where Amazon gives it to PS4 it is very hard to draw any conclusions about where Amazon's ability to reflect the 8th gen hardware market over all breaks down. At the moment it appears to reflect the hardware market incredibly well. The only time Amazon got it wrong was Nov 2013 when it gave the month to Xbox 360 (and xb one second) when PS4 actually won the month on NPD (PS4 wasn't even in Amazon's top 100 that month). This anomalous data point (which has lots of explanations for why it was probably predictably going to be wrong) at present would imply the opposite of what you are suggesting. Though because the launch month is an anomaly it should be ignored entirely. |
1. Yes you could be right. I think the weakest posint of my argument was saying that the 9 position in Jan should of equaled more than a 40k gap in the NPD. I'll explain more when specifically replying to that point. Has far as hardware goes between NPD and Amazon, I do still think there is an offset. Hardware hasn't been proven yet (nor disproven) but software kind of has. Like mentioned, when PS4 software is ahead on Amazon it always is on NPD. With X1 it's not the same, a lot of the time Amazon will have the PS4 version winning with NPD showing the opposite. With hardware we will have to wait. The up and coming months will be closer so my theory might be proven (or disproven). For my theory to stand and that the data is offset in favour of the PS4, when the X1 is ahead on Amazon, it always wins the NPD and when PS4 is ahead it doesn't always win. Amazon hasn't really been tested yet, there's only been a few tight months.
2. Again you are right but I'm not saying that the older gamer never buys from a physical stores and that younger gamers never buy online, I'm simply saying that there's a slight shift in buying preferences with different age groups. The reason I put it down to age is that the most obvious difference between PS gamers and Xbox gamers. Like somebody pointed out, younger gamers are less likely to have credit cards and maybe more free time to go shops. Again I'm only talking about small percentages here but enough to cause an offset.
3. Yeah I shouldn't of used the rankings to try and determine what the gap should of been. I simply do not know what the sales gap is between each item. 9th to 20th could be separated by a couple of thousand while the jump from 9th to 8th could be 10k alone. It's just to unpredictable. Ideally the further you go up the sales jump up a lot. for example 40th to 60th will have a lot lower spread in sales data than 1st to 20th. But it's too unpredicatable and no way of even trying to guess unless we had software sales data from NPD to try and gauge the jump between places.
4. My theory relates very well to the data that we have and doesn't break down at any point. The only way to prove it right or wrong is wait and see. The theory breaks down if X1 is ahead on Amazon but PS4 wins NPD. Same with software. Of course this doesn't include Amazon specific sales of a product.
5. Yep we will have to wait and see. And about the Amazon rankings for Nov 2013,Amazon isn't showing it because they ran out of preorder slots on the run up to launch. Preorders made in October and before will show up in those months. So by November they ran out which caused it to not appear in the top 100.
