Looking back at the holiday sales for the past few years, I compared Black Friday week with Christmas. What I found was that usually Christmas is bigger than Black Friday in sales, especially for portables. The odd thing I found was that least year, the Xbox 360 had a much bigger Black Friday than Christmas.

Black Friday 2011
Xbox 360 - 1,302,261
Wii - 866,825
PS3 - 832,249

Christmas 2011
Xbox 360 - 1,072,725
Wii - 874,914
PS3 - 885,066

What caused this paradox?

Christmas and Black Friday are the same thing in the USA. People buy for Christmas on Black Friday to get the best deals plus finish their gift buying early. The Xbox 360 does better than the others in the USA because it's just more popular in the USA.

360 had some goddamn ridiculous deals last black friday.

walmart last year

4GB Xbox 360 - $199.99 w/ free $50 Gift Card, Gears of War 3 and 3-month Xbox LIVE Gold Card (Walmart.com only starting at Midnight.)
4GB Xbox 360 Kinect Bundle - $199.96 w/ $50 Gift Card

and best buy, target, amazon, toysrus were giving 100$ gift cards with purchase of a 4gb 360.

That's why many thought NPD numbers were wrong.

Are these stores even making a profit with these sales? 

How can NPD be wrong though?
I heard they only estimated Walmart sales, are they tracking them now?

It's always been maintained on here that they do, but I've always argued that MS supplements sales as a kind of temporary price drop.
Sony has, in my opinion, confirmed my suspicions by saying their new strategy of pricing is retailer discounts.

uhm I think they started tracking them shortly before last Christmas. Though knowing NPD the holidays could've been stealth adjustments like they do sometimes.
Still NPD is the most unreliable of the popular tracking services. European and Japanese numbers are far more accurate.

It's just that everyone and their mother expected much higher sales (including analysts) and NPD was the only one which showed a decline or at the very least stagnating numbers from November to December.


EDIT: Well that was wrong. NPD started tracking Walmart since June 2012.

Their where better deals on the 360 during Black Friday so its only natural that it should have sold better during that week the same thing will happen this year.

Most stores don't make much profit on video game hardware. They sell those because they get repeat customers who come and buy video game software which higher profit margins.