| dmillos said: 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. |
That's exactly why my proposal is way more interesting. As we can see FY16 to FY17 saw a very minor revenue drop for MS despite the fact that install base has grown almost 1.5x compared to last year. But that's where the so popular term "engagement" comes into play. We can only get the full picture if we have the data on out hands about how many active Xbox console users are buying the games and what is their yearly average spendings. If I were to guess that drop might contribute to such factors as 360 users finally retiring their consoles and not buying MTX for example in online games, some very active and popular Xbox online game decreasing in popularity significantly, overall software sales being lower with average spending being less than last year, or even a bigger price drops and deals for consoles (not sure if counts) and so on...
