Amazon US September monthly bestsellers and general Amazon-based discussion

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GribbleGrunger said:

Abun said:
Xbox has Oct. but PS will destroy Nov and Dec.I think Halo is being rushed anyway in order to slow down the onslaught once MS was not able to secure a COD bundle and a BF bundle,which I am sure they tried to.They bet on the wrong horses this generation paying for TitanFall and Tomb Raider.Halo has never sold the Xbox alone and destiny,COD and BF all offer the same experience.Most of their top games are just shooting games except Forza with Scalebound being the only none shooter for the future and that won't sell either.

I really wouldn't be sure about that any more. The first weeks release of Halo straddles both late October and early November, probably in the hope of securing both months, but that could be a mistake. Sony have up until the 27th October to build up a healthy lead before the bog Halo push and then they have Star Wars to guarentee November. It's quite possible that Sony could edge October and easily win November.

You wanna know something interesting? When Halo 3 released it got over 3.8 million in world wide sales week 1. Xbox 360 only increased week on week by 41%. In the USA Halo 3 only got a 19% bump. And in terms of release timeframe Halo 5 is coming out at about the same point in the cycle as Halo 3. The second week of Halo 3 Xbox 360 only dropped 8% worldwide and actually went up 6% int he USA. So the 2 week effect was actually more like 80% over previous week baseline. So there might actually be something to  the notion that the halo bump might stretch over 2 weeks and therefore not give October as much of a final boost as I thought.

I expect Halo 5 to actually cause a bigger hardware spike because it's coming a month later, and therefore closer to the holidays, and of course there's the limited edition consoe that has been being pre-ordered for a while now. So expect a fair bit more than a 19% lift in the USA week on week. But what the Halo 3 experience also tells you is that well over 90% of Halo buyers already had a 360. And 360 was at only 11 million when Halo 3 released, and Halo 3 is the biggest selling Halo game on 360. Xb one is already at 13 million sold and a bit over 1 million ahead of Xb one in the USA. While there will absolutely be a substantial hardware boost when Halo 5 comes along, I'm starting to wonder if it will be quite as big as I first thought it would be.

However, I think Sony can only probably secure an October NPD win if it drops the PS4 price early to mid October. If it waits for PGW then it will have no positive effect on sales, and could actually have a negative effect is the market in general starts to expect a price cut. October might be a lot tighter than I expected.

All data is VGC data of course, so take that for what you will.