While the PS4 was not a virtual sellout back in April of last year it was still hard to find. Amazon was getting alot of shippedments of PS4s. So if someone could not find a PS4 in their local store they would go to Amazon. I have not check alot of retailer lately (nor do I think the one near me would be representative as I live in Hawaii) but I from what I understand both the XB1 and PS4 are easy to find so people have no other reason to go to Amazon right now other than that being their purchasing preference (online shopping).

Now if your theory is that PS4 buyers have more of an online preference I could buy that, but would need to know the basis of that theory.

That could explain the huge difference in rankings.

Basis of my theory? I'm trying to find the differences between xbox fans and PS fans and the only one I can come up with is average age. There was a fact that Xbox owners average age is younger than PS owners last gen. If that is still true then we have to work out what younger gamers do different to older gamers and one conclusion that I came up with was that younger gamers might prefer to buy from brick and mortar stores and maybe gaming specific retailer.

This is believable but in no way conclusive. It would explain the conflicting data between Amazon and NPD for software and explain why Amazon rankings do not really relate to NPD figures. eg last April, 16 place difference turned out to be only 20k and January 9 place difference within the top 20 turned out only to be 40k.

I agree with the age difference, that is why the XBOX always has a betting increase % over the holidays. Teens are less likely to have a credit card or even a paypal to buy things online. That said, many of these younger gamers have thier parent still buying things for them. So the people actually paying for the system might still be more likely to buy it online.

It would be an interesting stat to see the average age of people actually buying the consoles. As we know the age of the people playing the consoles skews older on the Playstation.

Yep you're right but it would only take a small difference in buying habits to cause an offset in data on Amazon. Personally I see more younger gamers in gaming stores that the older gamers.

I think it would be a brave fanboy to take a bet on a PS4 NPD win if PS4 and Xb one are within 5 places on the Amazon rankings. It has nothing to do with PS being more popular on Amazon than Xb (though that may or may not be the case because where is the objective proof of this either way?) But the fact that Amazon doesn't have the majority of market share in hardware. It's possible it may have the biggest market share, but that still may only be 15-20% among several players.

What we know, from January is that a gap as small as 9 places within the top 20, without any other significant sku's being elsewhere in the rankings, is highly likely to mean a NPD win for the top ranked console. Winning by "only" 40K in January is as much a reflection of the fact that January had low absolute sales as anything else. PS4 still beat Xb one by over 20%, and that is a significant gap. Indeed on a market share basis PS4 got a larger market share of combined sales in January than Xb one did in December Xb one was 17% ahead of PS4 in December.

When sales on Amazon are close it is likely to mean they are close at other retailers and there will be more retailers where Xb one is ahead simply because the market is not homogenous.

Saying Amazon isn't entirely accurate is statistically speaking so blindingly obvious that one wonders why there needs to be a thread pointing it out. When you take a sample of a population and use it to predict a result for the total population statistical axioms tell us that the sample might be giving you the wrong result. Therefore you work out the probability that your result will be wrong.

At present what we can reasonably say is that if the gap on Amazon is 9 or more and there aren't multiple skus of the second placed console that are charting we have 95-99% confidence that Amazon will correctly pick the winner. Though with only 1 month having a gap of 9 (the gap was 14 in December in favour of Xb one, and even bigger than that in November) we might have to lower the confidence until we get more months with a 9-10 gap correctly predicting the NPD winner. We also have Dec 2013 where the gap was only 4 places in favour of Xb one, and the NPD gap was only 45K, in a high selling month unlike January 2015, If anything that suggests Amazon could be very reliable in picking the winner even with only a small gap in the rankings. We need more months with small gaps in the rankings to be able to assess reliability. But a 9 gap month and a 4 gap month both getting it right does suggest a fairly remarkable reliability. One thing Amazon got wrong in December 2013 was that it was actually 3DS that won the month. So Amazon seems to be a bit unreliable at reading handheld hardware sales. So the limit of Amazon's reliability may be only with home console hardware.

For Feb we appear to be heading towards another month where the Amazon gap might be in the 8-12 range, and if it's under 10 it will give us another bit of information that can allow us to gain more, or less, confidence about months with sub-10 gaps.

From a gaming perspective if the Order flops badly with critics and also proves to be a one week wonder sales wise that might be sad for Sony and PS4, but it might keep things interesting from an Amazon vs NPD perspective as PS4 and Xb one might stay relatively close in the monthly rankings. On balance I prefer The Order to be successful, but an unsuccessful The Order will have a very thin silver-lining to it if you like analysing the sales.

I agree with most of what you said but I do see a pattern emerging and enough for me to have reason to create this thread, especially with software. Is it coincidence that when it shows the X1 version of the game ahead on the NPD data, alot of the time it isn't ahead on Amazon while when it shows the PS4 version ahead on the NPD it's always ahead on Amazon. Always! (unless I've missed some exceptions). This is why I think there is an offset between the PS sales and X1 sales.

I can only present what facts I find and fill in the spaces and I follow NPD/Amazon sales a lot so although nothing is set in stone, I'm not blindly spurting out stuff. Some lateral though has gone into this thread. Although I used only January data, I did so because it's a very good example of what I'm trying to say. I'm not simply using only one month of data but what I've seen from the launch of both consoles. And yes 40k win is pretty weak for a 9 place lead in the top 20 on the best sellers. If it is 15%-20% so the gap on Amazon should be around 8k. That's around 250 difference in sales per day for the whole of the US to make the difference between 9th and 19th. That doesn't sound right to me.

Software on Amazon is a very different and highly unreliable beast compared to hardware. Amazon has been very poor at predicting the NPD top 10, and as you've pointed out very poor at predicting the highest selling sku of any given multiplat game. The fact that Amazon has been 100% at calling PS4 vs Xb1 since Dec '13 suggests there's something different going on with hardware. I don't think you can necessarily or easily extrapolate software buying trends to hardware. It is possible (or rather likely) that the PS demographic does tend to prefer to buy software online instead of brick and mortar, which may or may not be an age related thing. But it is also possible that the PS and Xb demographics both have similar online vs. bricks and mortar preferences when it comes to buying the consoles themselves.  Indeed Amazon's 100% reliability outside of the launch month for hardware and poor reliability for software in every month does suggest the hardware buying preferences are more even between the console demographics. There is something just a bit more satisfying in buying a piece of hardware by handing over the cash (or the card) and getting that immediate satisfaction of having the console in your hot hands right away. I don't think age plays so much of a role in that, because people like that warm rush of excitement and satisfaction with having a nice new electronic gadget in the hands no matter how old they are.

The other interesting stat is that the closest the 2 consoles have ever been on Amazon was Dec 2013. That month the gap was only 4 placings in Xb one's favour, and with PS4 selling 860-ish K and Xb one selling ~900K the gap was just over 40K. Sure that's the same gap as January with the gap being 9 places. But as a % of sales it was only ~2.5% difference. As opposed to the January situation where the difference was 20%. In some ways it seems like Amazon's rankings do reasonably reflect the market share situation.

I also think you are reading how the amazon rankings work wrongly. There is no basis to a claim that the gaps at higher rankings will necessarily be larger. That is pure speculation. I have no problem believing the difference between 9th and 18th is 250/day in a month when PS4 only sells 192K nation-wide and is the 9th ranked item on Amazon and Amazon has 15-20% of the hardware market. If Amazon only sold 38K PS3's for the whole month and that was good enough to rank 9th then relatively small gaps from 9 to 18 are not unreasonable. There is no homogineity to the sales ranks. The gap between 1 and 2 could be single digits, and the gap between 5 and 6 could be over 20,000. I think the conclusion you can draw is the higher the absolute number of sales, the bigger the gape is likely to be between ranks. But in months where sales a fairly low the gap between ranks can be very small indeed, even in the top 10 / 20.

If you do an analysis of Amazon monthly ranks between PS4 and Xb one, and the NPD gap both numerically and % there might be some interesting conclusions that we can draw. But right now I don;t think the facts you're drawing on suggest antyhing other than when the Amazon ranking gap narrows, so does the NPD gap. And in all likelyhood when the gap narrrows to just a few placings the correlation between Amazon and NPD will probably collapse. But that does not obviously have anything to do with buyer habits and demographics, it's just a statistical relatity that when the difference between samples is small the predictive value of the result the samples are suggesting is low unbless the sample size is very large as a proportion of the total population. Basic statistics. 

Until Xb one beats PS4 in NPD in a month where Amazon gives it to PS4 it is very hard to draw any conclusions about where Amazon's ability to reflect the 8th gen  hardware market over all breaks down. At the moment it appears to reflect the hardware market incredibly well. The only time Amazon got it wrong was Nov 2013 when it gave the month to Xbox 360 (and xb one second) when PS4 actually won the month on NPD (PS4 wasn't even in Amazon's top 100 that month). This anomalous data point (which has lots of explanations for why it was probably predictably going to be wrong) at present would imply the opposite of what you are suggesting. Though because the launch month is an anomaly it should be ignored entirely.

It is still a very strong indicator, but what you say is true. PS4 owners tend to be older and more likely to buy from the internet (let alone have a credit card). The same demographic skew gives the Xbone a huge holiday advantage, with parents buying the console for their kids.

Despite this, it's such a strong indicator that it still has not been wrong as an NPD ranking prediction tool so far this gen.

Nice statement with 0 data to back it up. I remember last-generation where Xbox 360 was always top of the list by a greater difference in ranking. Must be because Xbox guys are more likely to buy from Amazon. Also Amazon never had the best Xbox One deals, Target almost always has a better deal. If I was buying a Xbox One a few weeks ago I would buy it from Target, and get the same bundle for the same price with the additional Xbox Live and latest Madden included. If I was buying a PS4, everyone has the same deals so I would be lazy and get it on Amazon.

This doesn't mean that Amazon is Playstation land, any more than the US as a whole is Playstation land. Microsoft had retail-specific deals better than Amazon, so if you buy an Xbox One you have more incentive to buy it elsewhere, but that incentive isn't enough to make change the results based on the ranking unless they were next to each other. 

False logic. This is ranking and nothing more. While generally the higher you are the farther the distance that is not always the case. You will find many situations where 1-3 are very close while 5-10 are very close and 10-20 are fairly close. This is ranking, making any claims between the gaps is foolish. 1-5 might have a smaller gap combined then 5 and 6 while 6-20 might also have a smaller gap combined than 5 and 6.

Amazon should never be used for software sales. First of all Amazon has deals all the time and sales are constantly going on, this highly distorts software sales. When they have quick sales, there are more PS4 owners which. These are impulse buys, and so when the deals happen are a lot closer to the userbase than traditional new games at full price. For quite a while games like COW were cheaper on the PS4 on Amazon even though everywhere else had them for the same price. Unlike consoles, the software sales are always in flux and are always a bigger percent in price difference from actual hardware.

1. Yes you could be right. I think the weakest posint of my argument was saying that the 9 position in Jan should of equaled more than a 40k gap in the NPD. I'll explain more when specifically replying to that point. Has far as hardware goes between NPD and Amazon, I do still think there is an offset. Hardware hasn't been proven yet (nor disproven) but software kind of has. Like mentioned, when PS4 software is ahead on Amazon it always is on NPD. With X1 it's not the same, a lot of the time Amazon will have the PS4 version winning with NPD showing the opposite. With hardware we will have to wait. The up and coming months will be closer so my theory might be proven (or disproven). For my theory to stand and that the data is offset in favour of the PS4, when the X1 is ahead on Amazon, it always wins the NPD and when PS4 is ahead it doesn't always win. Amazon hasn't really been tested yet, there's only been a few tight months.

2. Again you are right but I'm not saying that the older gamer never buys from a  physical stores and that younger gamers never buy online, I'm simply saying that there's a slight shift in buying preferences with different age groups. The reason I put it down to age is that the most obvious difference between PS gamers and Xbox gamers. Like somebody pointed out, younger gamers are less likely to have credit cards and maybe more free time to go shops. Again I'm only talking about small percentages here but enough to cause an offset.

3. Yeah I shouldn't of used the rankings to try and determine what the gap should of been. I simply do not know what the sales gap is between each item. 9th to 20th could be separated by a couple of thousand while the jump from 9th to 8th could be 10k alone. It's just to unpredictable. Ideally the further you go up the sales jump up a lot. for example 40th to 60th will have a lot lower spread in sales data than 1st to 20th. But it's too unpredicatable and no way of even trying to guess unless we had software sales data from NPD to try and gauge the jump between places.

4. My theory relates very well to the data that we have and doesn't break down at any point. The only way to prove it right or wrong is wait and see. The theory breaks down if X1 is ahead on Amazon but PS4 wins NPD. Same with software. Of course this doesn't include Amazon specific sales of a product.

5. Yep we will have to wait and see. And about the Amazon rankings for Nov 2013,Amazon isn't showing it because they ran out of preorder slots on the run up to launch. Preorders made in October and before will show up in those months. So by November they ran out which caused it to not appear in the top 100.