| pastro243 said: Can someone explain to me what are the odds of ps4 having it's best BF period in PlayStation history (is that official? How much would it be?) and yet sell "only" a million in the us? I mean, would that mean the rest of the month it was dead or something? Some sales were moved to december npd totals? |
I'm starting to think that this Black Friday is not representative at all of how good or bad Sony did this month. For one, Black Friday didn't really apply to anyone looking at Ps4 pro as there were no official bundles or price cuts, and the only deals to be had were from target where the entire store was 20% off and then Amazon who briefly price matched. Neither was advertised by Sony Amazon or Target. So again, the focus this Black Friday would have been on both slim consoles which actually had official deals with advertising. Next, we know that the Pro launched on November 10th. Obviously the week surrounding this would have been at least slightly front loaded as it is with all console launches but would it also be reasonable to assume that anyone looking for a Pro might've stayed home with the rest of the Americans that didn't want anything to do with Black Friday? Again, not really any incentive as there were no official deals or bundles. So with that being said, the overwhelming majority of sales would've come from the slim model. If that sounds reasonable then we'd have to consider how many slim sales were cannibalized from the release of the pro which, according to Sony has been a surprising amount. Slim sales would and will be down compared to the OG PS4 launch aligned, but overall the PlayStation brand will be up YoY as there is now a new tier of performance which splits up the SKU configurations to choose from. In other words, Sony might have "only" sold 1.1 million on Black Friday but it was largely the slim... We only have half the picture. Look at the entire week and already we know it's the biggest week ever for them. Everyone says that the focus on the holidays is shifting more and more to Bf but it sort of appears like its focusing more so on Black Friday WEEK. Cyber Monday, pre Black Friday starting up to 3 days early for many stores...
The thing is the sales were probably spread all around and the Pro has no business participating in this event this year. We also know that the ONLY day reported by windowscentral is for Black Friday and only Black Friday. It's not an accurate snapshot of what's really going on and whether or not they've intentionally been misleading is up in the air but there have been factors at play here that I myself at least hadn't really been thinking about, but start to paint a different picture when you think about it. I don't think Sony is worried. I don't think PlayStation will be even remotely down YOY for the month. I think they were only down YOY for Black Friday, that single day, and I think their sales were spread out more evenly over the week as well as the Pro hitting big just the previous two weeks. The real question is
how did PS4 Slim outsell the Xbox slim when the ps4 had competition from itself in the form of the pro some weeks earlier while the Xbox had no alternative model to sell? Consider that they supposedly just got outsold by 100k despite Sony having two separate models on Black Friday, one that shared the same discounts as Xbox and one that largely remained the same in price.
