| padib said: If you legitimately disagree with me, then I am ready to explain why it's correct. That doesn't make my projection dumb simply because you disagree. But most importantly the issue I raised is that the comment that replied to me basically said the exact same thing I did... To help you understand why it's front-loaded, think of the market as a set of people. Said people buy the console at various times in the gen, but ultimately there is a cap on how many people will buy the machine. The only way the numbers could not be front-loaded is if the cap massively grew, proportionally speaking. Is this something you would agree with? If so, what would be the reasoning behind it? To me, that position is untenable. |
Why wouldn't it grow? The sales numbers comparing LTDs in the same timeframe for PS3 and PS4 in certain Asian and ROW countries show that there definitely was a growth in that cap, the gap is too much to attribute to front-loading. It is only normal for this to happen as less developed (whether they are still less developed or not) countries get in on these things later than the other ones. The only question is whether the cap in already established markets became lower or not and you're probably never going to find that out because either:
A) There is a decline that could hint at that but at the same time causes Sony/MS to come out with a new console, cutting the gen shorter and messing up the generational gap (if after 6 years there is a big advantage for this gen but is something like 20M behind the last one, how is that front loaded?)
B) there is no decline, or one not big enough, in which case the gen lasts as long as the previous. But in that case, they weren't front loaded because they keep on selling all those years.
The only discernible cap loss so far lies with the Wii's casual audience. And the Wii wasn't in the article.
Furthermore..it is even less worth arguing such a thing when you consider that these numbers don't actually represent the cap properly. Example:
Gen 1 sells a total of 170M. 50M only bought console A, 50M only bought console B. 35M bought both consoles. The cap here is 135M.
Gen 2 sells a total of 160M. 70M only bought console A. 40M only bought console B. 25M bought both consoles. Cap is 135M as well.
If you want to talk caps you need to work with significant margins of error and uncertainty. And you should have said something else entirely instead of saying it's front loaded because that's not really what you're saying. Replace it with "I don't think this gen would be able to outpace the previous forever because something something" and it's much better. There are easy ways of explaining why X1 won't outpace 360, why PS4 won't outpace PS2, etc, and it's not saying "this one is front loaded".
