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Smashchu2 on 07 July 2008
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Uraeus said:
Dolla Dolla said:
Uraeus said:
Actually you do not need to outsell someone to catch up. First of all the original article seems to use the term in the context of weekly sales. So they can mean catch up in weekly sales, which is different than lifetime sales (duh :).

Secondly, in terms of lifetime marketshare you do not need to outsell someone to 'catch up', you only need to do so to overtake. You just need to improve your sales ratio to be better than the historic one to start catching up in terms of market share. Of course if you actually outsell your competitor you will speed up the process of catching up in terms of market share a lot. Seriously people this is basic mathematics. Just to make it very simple. If you have lifetime sales of 50 units and your competitor have sold 100 units you will have a market share of 33% while your competitor has a market share of 66%. If the next week you sell 90 units and your competitor sells a 100, he still sells more than you, but your market share still grows to 41%.

Ah, so percentages are important?

Nice. And we sillies thought it was just the raw numbers!

Yeah, well seems to be a lot of people on this site who should spend more time doing their school homework and less time gaming :)

Percentages matter of course just as much or little as raw numbers or rather they only matter when looked at together. A percentage is 'meaningless' if one company sold one unit and the other two even though the percentage is high, just as much as bragging about a 200 000 unit sales lead is meaningless if the total sales of the market means that is a 0.00001 percentage lead in sales.

 

Actually, I beleive your wrong. Sony's precent will still decline. The reason is that while they are still seeling more units, so is Nintendo. My example is this:

Two consoles: A and B where A outsells B 10:1 normally. The total sold out of the entire market is 220. So, A has 89% and B has 11%.

Now, the next week the ratio was 5:2. A sold less and B sold more then the norm. By your logic, the % for B should be higher and lower for A. However, that is not the case. A sold 5 console and B sold 2 so the total is 227 now. But B's % is 10.32% (B had a total of 22 units at this point, A has the rest). Lower then the week before. After 10 weeks it will be 297 total and B would have 7.07%.

So, even though the gap is smaller, A is still outselling B so B's precent can only go down. It will stay the same is the ratio is 1:1 and got up if B is actually outselling A. Basically, the PS3 is only doing worse, just they loss less ground this week then before.

EDIT:nevermind, I messed up. Your right. Of course, profit is what matters in the end. % are only to help make money (especially in Sony's case). Despite higher market share, Sony lost money to make it happen, so who won in the end?