NPD Analyst Expects Over 600,000 Xbox One X Sold this Year; PS4, Xbox One, Switch Could All Win November

[DonFerrari]

VideoGameAccountant said:

CosmicSex said:

That data is irrelevent for several reasons.

First we know that Adobe conducted a survey of something like 4500 online retailers but we don't know the distribution of sales for each retailer in terms of actual numbers; only rations split into a top five list.  Did major online retailers participate in this collection?  If you know the answer to this, we could at least try to correlate those ratios (I mean top five). check this out: https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/2017-11-20/videogames/ref=zg_bsar_videogames_pg_3?ie=UTF8&pg=1

Second, we saw retailer and online sellouts of consoles on Black Friday.  the simple question is what is the volume of stock major retailers have asopposed to online stores like Amazon. 

All I am really trying to say is that the data that Adobe provides doesn't give a whole picture and it doesn't at the VERY least tell os dollars spent at the two types of retailers.  Have you noticed that the NPD now waits for digital sale information before telling us who sold the most?  Thats because online/digital has become  a huge deal.  You are right to assert the findings from PracticaleCommerece but remember we are talking about consoles. They are still sold mostly at brick and mortar retailers on Black Friday.  Thats why they are always featured.

You're trying to say Adobe's data is arbitrary while providing similar arbitrary evidence. I could say the same things about an Amazon list. It doesn't tell us much beyond rankings. At the same time, it's comparing apples to oranges. Abode wont reconciles because you are talking about 4,500 online storefronts vs 1. Even if we consider the fact that Amazon has over 40 percent of the market, that doesn't account for the rest of the market. And since we don't know the difference between the rankings, we don't know what kind of difference is present between #1 and #12 of the video game section.

Moreover, I provided that data to show the volume of online sales vs retail sales which shows that online accounts for ~50 percent of sales.  Because online is a major portion of shopping and Adobe covered a lot of online retailers, we can use the information to make inferences. Adobe also tracks ALL products, not just one sector so one system selling, as well as other maintstream products, is a strong indicator of how its doing overall. 

Retailers will vary somewhat due to doorbuster deals, but beyond that, there is no reason to think that the buying habits would vary greatly such as retail buyers purchasing more PS4s or online shoppers buying more XBox Ones. Moreover, how do we know most consoles are still bought in the store? There isn't enough to infer that on its own.

All in all, it appears criticism of the Adobe report has more to do with it not agreeing with a preset notion rather than actual flaws in the methodology. If you have more information on why it's wrong, please bring it. Adobe provided a bit on what their tracking and did it over multiple products and multiple days. It's also not completely new (http://www.cmo.com/adobe-digital-insights/articles/2016/11/8/2016-holiday-shopping-up-to-the-minute-data-from-adi.html#gs.r_SyZIs  ). So I think with what we know now, it's safe to make inferrences off the data as long as we know the limitations.

The same could be said about you defending their analysis because of the console that they have as winner....

But funny enough, you don't think there is anything strange with PSVR outselling PS4 on their list or the fact that PS4 isn't even ranked... while they had their best BF ever...

Will you come and apologize if PS4 is the top seller or will you find a wait to excuse you out of this?