December NPD 2022 Thread - #1 MWII, #2 Pokemon S/V, #3 GoW Ragnarok

[RolStoppable]

Kyuu said:

Not bias... it's expectations. The community here generally expected this generation to be much closer than the previous one, this extends to the tracking team. Xbox quarterly reports being more vague than before (due to the big price gap between Series S and X) is also making revenues less meaningful/reliable for extrapolation. Xbox sales are extremely difficult to accurately estimate, this is why I never take any estimates very seriously, can't even trust Famitsu's numbers for the matter. But I respect most relevant estimates because they represent a knowledgeable person's hard work, which does apply to VGChartz.

That said, the leak's November figures were a disaster for Xbox. They lend weight to a lot of arguments that I and some others made, but even I didn't think it was going to be this bad. Series S is looking more and more like a misfired product, Series X too might be misfired in the sense that it's very expensive/difficult to produce in true mass quantities. Series S was likely carried by the pandemic and the limited PS5 (and Series X) availability relative to demand.

Let's see what Starfield can do because Xbox is in serious need for a killer app right now. Then again, Xbox's biggest problem may be its redundancy to the millions of players who are switching to PC.

Indeed, Series S looked much better than it really is due to the ongoing low supply of the SKUs that are in real demand. It's doubtful that the Series S will matter much in sales in 2024 and beyond as the component shortages should be finally sorted out. Then we'll finally see a stop to claims that Series S was a smart business decision when it really just came down to dumb luck with the unforeseen component shortages.

Microsoft's first party output has been abysmal for Series S|X when it comes to selling hardware. Xbox should not get beaten so decisively in the USA in November, but it's the result of Xbox having nothing really good going for it over PS other than Game Pass. If Microsoft continues to execute in such a lackluster manner, then the end of the component shortages will result in Xbox sales remaining flat to what they've been in 2022 while PS5 sales will increase very significantly.

Regardless of anyone's expectations though, it should be 100% obvious to everyone that Microsoft won't provide unambiguous shipment figures of any kind for their console business. At the same time it shouldn't matter too much, because we all know Xbox will finish in third place anyway. It's just the smaller question of by how much that will lack clarity for most of the generation, so why bother being upset with VGC.