Amazon US November monthly bestsellers and general Amazon-based discussion.

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OneKartVita said:
Black friday is almost 2 weeks away. If Microsoft are holding back until then they're fucked. 27 days of getting hammered will not be made up. Especially when there's a ton of pre November pre orders and then losing the first 26 days heavily.

And if the leaks are true they have no advantage black friday so might lose that too.

If they lose November and black friday by a large margin. My question is, do they cut further in December to remain competitive?

In theory a BF strategy could work to win you NPD. About 50% of hardware sales for November happens on BF week (according to VGC), and of course most of that is on BF weekend. If you can win BF by a big margin then you can completely overturn the sales difference that has built up in the earlier weeks of November. The question is whether MS has the line up and specials to do that. I'm not sure they do. Sony is in a financial position, and the cost of making and distribution PS4 is low enough that Sony can afford to be pretty generous this BF, which makes trying to get a BF win for Xb one by a substantial margin a challenge.

And with Halo 5 not quite achieving the level of sales MS was probably hoping for the game is probably less able to drive sales as a bundle offer than what an earlier iteration in the series might have. The game has received reasonable praise for many elements and the review socres have been good, but many reviewers and gamers have had similar complaints about its faults, and that will hurt Halo 5's long terms sales. When everyone complains about the same thing that puts people off because they will think those problems are real and substantial, when people generally have different complaints, that is less of a problem because you can put those complaints down to personal taste / preference, and they can't be all that bad because only some people are complaining. I'm sure MS had plans for Halo to be the centrepiece of its holiday strategy, and it's not looking as strong as what it needs to be to really bring the big sales for Xb one.