Okay well the first thing is that it is not marketing and it is not "clever use of numbers". The consoles arent given to retailers on consignment, the retaliers have to purchase the consoles from Microsoft before they can sell them in the store. So technically yes Microsoft has sold 10.4 million consoles, to them whether or not those 10.4 are in the hands of consumers will not net them any further money as they have already received it. All companies use these Nintendo calls it shipped totals while Sony and Microsoft use sold, its all the same and as I just said before technically they have been sold as Microsoft have received the money for them. The second thing is that you are contradicting yourself. You said in september they announced that they had shipped 6 million units but had only sold between 4-5 million at the time ie so lets average it out and say that they had sold 4.5 million of these 6 million consoles. Which means that there are 1.5 million sitting in retailer stores waiting to be sold. Now that they have shipped 10.4 million you are trying to say that retailers have 2.3 million consoles shitting on retail shelves ??? I would love to know how in the space of three months there are suddenly more unsold 360 per store than in September. Stores only order what they can sell and I find it impossible to believe that there would be an extra 800k-1m of unsold stock in retailers hands, especially after Christmas and the 360s biggest month, than what there was in September. The unsold ratio would remain pretty similar.

Well ,what you say have some sense ,but in fact generally as a console increases its lifetime there is more stock around and more possibilities of unsold stock ...if you look at your own numbers in percentages you will see it .8 million to 10 million is a 80% of the consoles shipped sold ....while 4,5 against 6 is exactly a 75% of the consoles shipped sold .The actual numbers would be better that the end september data . Its obvious that if a shop never sells their units they wont be purchasing more ,but as the circulation of the console increases there is more and more shops and online sites that get stuck with some shipment and becasuse outside big populations end up having many consoles unsold .

By the way ,the data of the Lazard analysts was 4.5 million as cumulative total for the X360 ,not consoles sold in 2006 .That means they are refering only to the USA and we should add some 450 00-500 000 consoles for Canada and Mexico for around 5 million total ,in wich case vfgcharts would be really close or if he was refering to all NA then vgcharts is actually giving the X360 a great benefit of the doubt in the december data ..it could be in excess of around 700 000 consoles .Other take would be that mexico absorbs other 200 000 consoles and Lazar refered to 4,5 million only in US .. in that case vgcharts numbers would be nearly exact . I laughed a lot when I saw the information about nextgenwars .....to think there are actually tons of trolls posting as signature a link to that page to "show " what they would wish was happening is really a lot of fun ...

And they probably stock more units for christmas time.

Have you been to a BB, mine has 2 slabs of over 100 360s a piece sitting there everyweek and even more in the back for refill. 2.3 million also includes from the end of the assembly line, on boats, on trucks, and in stores.

M$ has shipped a ton of unsold consoles. I'll give you one evidence. Blue Dragon shipment to Japan. They had over 100,000 consoles available for that deal at launch and they sold what 30,000? 35,000? That 100,000 was in addition to what they already ship there monthly. That's way over what they actually were able to sell in Japan in December. Right now it is a marketing tactic for M$, and they are trying to inflate their numbers. Just like Nintendo will, and Sony will too once both of those stop selling out when they make shipments. They will ship more than there is demand for and start saying they have shipped or sold that many.

It's probably closer to 50k since they don't include internet sales and some major stores. This website is as inaccurate as nexgenwars.com. Anyone who uses this site as a source of sale trends is stupid.

A couple pages ago when I estimated a mere 200k for the week of Dec 25th to Dec 31st, you called me crazy. Let's revisit YOUR words: "2) Now you want to believe that another 200k were sold between the 25th and 31st because the 360 had been selling at a rate of about 200k a week beforehand. Well, I say, the 25th was Christmas and I don't know where you live, but where I'm from, EVERYTHING is closed. The 31st was a Sunday (and also a holiday) and again, where I'm from, EVERYTHING was closed or was closing early. So, now were going to get into a daily sell-through rate, right???" Now you want to tell me that 330k were sold from Dec 25th to Dec 31st and that's why vgcharts is off? I'd perhaps be willing to accept it if you want to tell me that vgcharts is displaying the WW total for mid-December, as that would account for the roughly 1 million units it is off by. So, I'll accept your excuse that vgcharts if off due to being horribly out of date. I somehow knew that if we kept at this you and I would see eye to eye!

You obviously have absolutely no grasp of how shipped/sold works. MS can not ship a console unless it is ordered by a store. MS can't just start shipping consoles to Best Buy as a "marketing tactic" to up its numbers. And even if they could, it would be a stupid tactic as at some point they aren't going to be able to ship anymore as the market was too flooded. This "tactic" wouldn't last long at all, and in the end would kick a company in the rear end when they quit selling/shipping consoles altogether due to oversaturation. MS counts its "sold" units when they leave their control and is "sold" to a retailer. MS has their money, and to them it is a "sold" console. A retailer only buys a console from MS when it feels it has a need to have that console. This is how all the video game companies do it... Nintendo, Sony, MS... all of them count a sold console this way. To them, that's all they can track, and really all they are concerned with... it's their bottom line. To put it another way, a console company can NOT just rent a warehouse in the desert and stack it full of 10 million consoles and count them as "sold". It's not the way the system works, and in the end it would be a terrible tactic for a company.

The shops order tons of consoles for the christmas period ...if all goes well and they sold everything they would command more in january if not there isnt so much of a problem they will sell them trough the first quarter and at least they have received some incentives as rappels for purchasing a big shipment ... seeing as there are tons of consoles on the shops we have to put us in the second scenario ...they arent purchasing any more in some time to come .