First he posted this:
Well the only figures from NPD that cause me any concern this month are DS hardware, PS3 hardware and Galaxy. Everything else, as far as I am concerned, agrees well enough to be within margins of data sampling differences. Tackling each one in turn:
DS hardware - from our sample data, DS was consistently selling better than all other hardware across the board. We had some shortages reported, but nowhere near the level that NPD are reporting here and nowhere near the level that Wii seemed to be seeing. So the obvious conclusions are that our stores were not that representitive in that they must have been better stocked than nationally on average, although I feel that NPD may be quite low themselves on DS data. I also think that sometimes they will scale data to account for errors in previous months, maybe we are seeing an element of this. We will speak to Nintendo to get a better feel from them as to how many units they actually managed to ship last month. Interestingly, if you compare NPD LTD figures for DS (and add a generous 10% for Canada) to Nintendo shipments you'll find that even if Nintendo didn't manage to ship any new units in Jan there should still have been enough units floating around from December to sell much more than 250k in Jan.
PS3 figures also defy logic to an extent. Sure people will be buying more PS3s since there is a shortage of 360 premiums but still that is a big jump from the kind of sales we saw in November / Dec (relative - it is obviousy less but not as much less as you'd expect given the modest holiday sales). Again, our data consistently had PS3 at the bottom of the pack, despite 360 shortages and I find it hard to see how we could be 80-90k too low unless some chains were seeing an enormous PS3 boost - all our data had it selling on par or slightly less than this time last year.
Galaxy sales are also a little suprising, from selling similar amounts to COD4 in November / December it sells half in Jan? Traditionally, we'd expect Mario to have larger legs, which of course it will later in the year as COD falls away, but again all of our data had Galaxy comfortably outselling everything else throughout Jan. So again, I'm in no rush to go changing anything and am waiting to see what manufacturers say on the issue.
A general comment about NPDs hardware data this month, all figures fall between 270k and 230k. Given the fact that ~80-90k of this is from Walmart / TRU alone, I'd almost call it a 6-way tie - especially under a situation with huge shortages which affect different stores in different ways. Walmart could quite conceivably have sold 150k DS alone last month, for example, had they been sent units preferrentially. I'm not saying they did, but it is worth bearing this kind of thing in mind. Certainly those making a big issue of PS3 > 360 when the difference is 30k in a month that has proven to be hard to peg down due to stock issues are definitely not showing much of an understanding for this kind of thing...
He posted in another thread too, but I can't remember where it was. But the gist of it was that he was not changing numbers, so we shouldn't expect it.
