Halo 5: Guardians sells more than $400 million (games and hardware)

[binary solo]

starcraft said:

bananaking21 said:

 

5- They didnt say sold through. Having been reading reports like these for years now, its pretty clear that unless sales are specifically said to be sold to consumers, that its sold in to retailers. Heck, lets say software is sold to consumers, just for your sake. But not one mention of anything sold through means that hardware, all controllers shipped and the Halo 5 bundle were included, even if they were sold to consumers or not, which heavily inflates the 400$ in revenue part. is there any mention of sold to consumers? 

you can keep running the numbers and doing all sorts of calculations that you want. but you wont get to any reasonable or logical conclusion. the best thing to do is wait for NPD, we already got UK sales, once we get USA sales we will get a much better picture of how the game, and hardware actually did. 

 

5. Shipped, sold through. Its presented as though its sold to consumers, as it is in the same breath as attach rates, but who knows these days?

TL:DR - If you don't like speculation, fine. But don't have a go at someone else's speculation, then proceed to do a poorer version of it yourself

Indeed, reading, yet again, the statement the PR associates $400 million with attach rate, by mentioning them in successive sentences, but they do not clearly link them. It's possible $400 million is shipped, while attach rate is clearly sell through. And of course as is mentioned plenty of times in various discussions, from an investor and accounting point of view shipped = sold because that's where the revenue comes in for the company. It's why quarterly and annual reports alway list shipped numbers for hardware and software and not sell through. So if MS was putting out PR primarily for investor and stock market purposes then they would normally be using shipped revenue.

It might be different this time around, because Halo is special, but it would generally be the exception to the rule for investor / stockmarket oriented announcements.