Alkibiádēs on 06 November 2015
| binary solo said: I'm not really seeing a big problem here. And certainly not one deserving of the hyperbole in the thread title. So basically the over all message is, VGC shows PSV is and has always been selling like shit everywhere other than Japan, but it turns out PSV has been selling somewhat shittier than VGC has shown. And the only people who care about the difference between actual and estimated are people who want Wii U not to be the shittiest selling hardware of the 8th generation. So let us say PSV is 600K over tracked as of today, it is ~400K ahead of it's LTD shipment number and we can place 200K on shop shelves. This is a 4.7% error compared to VGC's sell through estimate of 12.6M. Any LTD that is within 5% of actual global sales is quite reasonable IMO. You can't expect VGC to be any more accurate than that because they don't even get real sales data from all countries where hardware is selling. In fact my understanding is that VGC only gets actual sales information from a minority of countries, though I may be wrong. Let's say VGC is over tracking by 1 million. That's still only an 8% error. Certainly a higher error than desirable but not outrageously so. These expected error rates (who in their right mind expects VGC to be exact with sell through?) can make things look bad, especially when one console is over tracked and one undertracked, because it makes the relative gap between the consoles quite large compared to reality. But you can't compare reasonable errors for individual consoles and conclude an unacceptable error when combined. Each console estimate is independant of all other estimates. The thing people find hard to swallow is when VGC sell through > confirmed LTD shipment. But when you get a console that sells as shit as PSV that is a real risk because there are going to be so few units on shop shelves that even an overtrack error of a very acceptably low % will lead to a sell through estimate > LTD shipments. Let's assume there are 200K PSV's on shop shelves. VGC could be over tracking by as little as 1.6% and the VGC estimate would be above the PSV LTD. Now to the question: SHOULD VGC adjust the PSV down? Well, yes, no matter what % error they are sitting at, they can't credibly sustain a sell through LTD that is higher than the confirmed shipment LTD. They basically need to adjust down to what would be a fairly reasonable number of units in the retail channels. I hope it happens, but they need to remove those sales from specific countries and from specific weeks, they can't just say -11 PSVs from every country for every week from 3 Oct '15 back to 31 Dec '15 (27 Dec chart has PSV at 9.63M which is 130K under the shipped LTD at the time, probably a tad over, but pretty reasonable). That might give you a correct LTD, but you will reduce accuracy in individual countries. So I don't think people should be too upset about where things are sitting. |
It's most likely overtracked by 2 million +. How is that not a big deal for a console that sold so little? There's simply no way this console has been selling 40k units each week. 20k units seems much more like it. According to vgchartz it's selling 20k units in Europe alone, that's nearing 3DS numbers! Yet I have yet to see stores that have a Vita in stocks and never have I seen any sort of advertisement for anything related to the Vita. And I have been to many European countries past few years!
"The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" - Thoukydides
