I just wanted to take a look at the difference between sales & shipments to get a better guess at what PS4 will sell this year.

Having an extra 1.5-2 million shipped vs sold is a pretty good amount without having shortages or being overshipped.

We can see that 2013 had pretty extreme shortages while 2014/2015 were at the right spot and 2016 is when they overshipped PS4 by quite a bit.

This led to 2017 actually selling more than they shipped but we still see there was quite a large surplus.

Looking forward, Sony expects to ship 16 million this fiscal year (calender year shipments should be right around that mark as well).

If Sony wants to get the shipped/sold difference back into the 1.5-2 million range than we can probably expect sales to be more like 17-17.5 million.

Based on all this im expecting PS4 to basically sell what they sold in 2015/2016.

I thought the common baseline was to have 10 weeks worth of sales in surplus, in which case the PS4 needs around 2.5 million in stock to be normally shipped. Saying 1.5-2 million is a good number sort of ignores the differences in sales frequency - the Xbox One needs fewer units in stock than the PS4, likewise, the PS4 needs far fewer units in stock than, say iPhones.

We can only really confirm how well the PS4 is doing this year when we get the 80 million numbers. VGChartz might actually be overtraking for all we know. But if Sony announce that PS4 has sold over 80 million by the 11th of June or there abouts, it's on track to sell more than it did in 2015 and 2016. I don't see where the drop off would be to make it sell that much less.

Idk, maybe thats what it is, just seemed like the amount that various popular systems like Wii, 3DS, PS4, Switch have on shelves when there isnt shortages or overshipped.

But how do you figure what 10 weeks of surplus is when sales vary throughout the year?

Edit: looking at wrong numbers

We can use last FY's results to estimate how many of those 16m units forecast will be shipped this calendar year

Last FY only 13% of Shipments were in Q4, so that would mean out of the 16m forecast for this FY, 13.92m would be this calendar year.

So 13.92m (April 1st - December 31st) + 2.5m (Jan 1st - March 31st 2018) = 16.42m Shipped this Calendar Year.

Aiming for 1.5-2m on shelves means 17.3-17.8m sold this calendar year, so only a small difference from yours.

Though I expect the forecast will be adjusted up, just as it was last year.