| Shadow1980 said: So the PS4 may be down slightly from last October, huh? Well, if we take a look at per-week averages over the PS4's life (which allows us to account for the effects of five-week months on the apperance of monthly graphs), it may not be as bad as it does at first glance.
Last October had an unusually high per-week average. That this came after the release of Destiny suggests the possiblity of said game having a significant residual effect on sales, likely due to the limited edition bundle. Indeed, the white PS4 Destiny bundle was #23 at Amazon.com last year. To my knowledge there wasn't really anything else that month that could have stimulated sales enough to where they'd be about 50% higher than the pre-Destiny baseline. In 2015, January was down a good bit YoY, while the tax season months of February and March saw things rebound back to about where they were in Feb.+March 2014. Then we had another YoY drop for April & May. June was up a good bit YoY thanks to the Batman bundle, and July and August were up slightly. September had The Taken King, which did move additional hardware, though not to the degree that the original release of Destiny did. Looking at the PS4's performance so far, barring the release of big bundles (i.e., Destiny and Batman), the PS4's average baseline was 48-49k in the Q2-Q3 period. So, what of this month? Let's just assume the PS4 sold 280k in October. Since October is a 4-week month, that averages out to 70k per week. This is an over 40% increase in average weekly sales compared to the previous normal baseline. While we will have to wait and see if that's just a fluke, a 40% boost is about what the PS2 got after its first price cut. Total PS2 sales from May 2002 to March 2003 were up 42.7% from the May 2001 to March 2002 period. Even if the PS4 only managed 250k for October, that's still upwards of 30% up from the old baseline, which considering this is the smallest first price cut ever for a PlayStation console, both numerically and in terms of percentage, actually isn't that bad. After crunching the numbers, it appears that the price cut did work, and that this October only looks bad in direct comparison to last October, which had a per-week average well above the norm, likely due to the residual effects of Destiny. |
Good analysis. So 40% increase isn't to bad if indeed it did sell 280k
