| Shadow1980 said:
TL;DR: Launching during the holidays does have a clear, demonstrable effect on sales, with an obvious causal mechanism in play. This tends to favor Q4 launches when comparing LTD sales, at least for early-life sales (the effect does of course wear off over time). |
Come on man.... I expected more from you to be honest.
Your points are totally accurate. And I agree with you. But you left out one very crucial detail.
I am in agreement that holiday sales are always better. Theer is no doubt about that. I am NOT in agreement that launching during holidays is what makes anything better. Holiday sales will be holiday sales. One or even two years after launch in the hardware is doing well in general. Proof? Every console sells more during the holidays than they do for most months of the respective year combined.
What you lft out is what I think is the most important thing. Availability of stock.
It doesn't matter if you can sell 4, 5 or 6M consoles if you can only get 2M to market. And that is the point I have been trying to make.
Everything you or anyone that is of a similar notion is saying would make sense if in april we were seeing NS consoles everywhere. Then we could say that its what they get for releasing in march. The launched in march. Sold out completely of their available stock. Released new stock, sold out again, and again, and again..... so what exactly are we saying?
Ok.... how about this...... the NS would have sold much more if they launched in the holidays. Unfortunately they still would have only had 2M units for that period. See how that works?
Mind you.... it took the NS over 6 months to reach a point where they could meet that demand or at least now we can just walk into a store and see one. To put that in perspective, say it launched in november last year. It means that with how much stock they were able to provide, it still would have taken them till april to satiate the demand and get this... they would have still sold the exact same number of consoles they sold in that 6 month period cause they were selling everything they were making.
