Global Hardware Dec 13-19 - Switch Sales Top 75M, PS5 Tops 4M

[eva01beserk]

dmillos said:

derpysquirtle64 said:

To be fair, this graph is totally incorrect. It's like comparing apples to oranges. People who bought consoles in let's say FY16 will not suddenly stop investing their money in FY17. So, the better graph would be the number of total consoles sold by certain FY. This will give a better representation.

eva01beserk said:

What that graph shows is growth. But growth alone is not representative of anything. As that graph shows while yes, there is some growth in revenue, it is very small and its not even every year, its only for 2 years and then its nearly flat. Thats not good at all. THese companies like to see a steady growth wich the xbox division is not showing. 

Another importing metric needed is investment. With out that this graph means nothing. This increase in revenue could mean nothing if they spend more trying to get there. And as we all know, gamepass canot be cheap neither is all the studios they have bought out and now they are about to buy zenimax. 

So you are right. Consoles sold and/or subs is a more important metric cuz people buy once but keep spending on software for consoles, while subs they can sub a month and quit or be permanent, but MS wont disclose any of that info just that pointless unique players wich could as well mean they all subed for 1$ and never again. But yes, more consoles does mean faster gowth unlike the flat line we are seing from the xbox division. 

I enjoy having these conversations, and I believe both of you bring up a very important subject. I wouldn't refer to the graph being "Totally Incorrect", but rather it shows a particular perspective that might need additional information. 

What is important is to not take this or any other graph as answers, but rather as questions. That is why I posted the image, to ask why xbox could be having an increase in revenue but a clear decrease in console sales, I wondered if that was normal, or if there might be some other thing going on. 

@derpysquirtle64 You mentioned that it could be better to use accumulative console sales as it would better reflect the overall universe of Xbox users. I like the idea, as you are correct in the sense that a user might purchase an xbox in 2017 but subscribed to Game pass in 2020 or purchase a new game. 

For the accumulative line I removed  the xbox 360 as it might skew things and it really doesn't make much sense as anyone that bought an Xbox in 2008 really won't be generating much revenue in 2020.

It is also important to highlight that this chart will also be comparing a Yearly event like Fiscal revenue with an accumulative event like total console sales, so it can be easy for it to mislead people into thinking that console sales are increasing.

In particular, from seeing this cumulative line, I find it interesting that between 2013 and 2017 there was a steady growth in accumulative, but pretty flat in yearly revenue, why do you think this is?

I also played around with a similar graph I found online of nintendo fiscal years, and did the same experiment with adding the yearly console sales:

What I found to be very interesting is that in this chart there seems to be a big relation between console sales and yearly revenue, something that is quite different from Xbox, why do you think this is?

I find these questions to be very interesting, I am sure the answers are very complex and probably we won't be able to reach them, but it might just spark interesting conversations that lead to a better understanding of the console market.

I would not say that nintendo stand out in any way. As you can see from both graphs the xbox division also correlated before the x1 and as we can remember it was when the x1 started undderperforming that MS decided to be misleading with their sales data. They started lumping difernt things under their gaming division and other nonsense. I would think that nntendos graph is the more acurate one. If you can find the one from sony that would help a lot more.