I think it's just normal seasonal drop off combined with extraordinary early year sales.

To further illustrate my point, if one assumes a 25% dropoff from March to April, that would leave Xbox 360 sales at 156k (39k/wk) and PS3 sales at 153k(38.25k/wk).

So for GTAIV week sales, Xbox 360 sales improved 32k or 82% for the week. PS3 sales improved 34k or 89%. This is assuming no GTAIV related console sales occured before the launch, so the real world increase is probably a lot less for the week.

Looking back through a few years NPD most hardware drops between March and April, there are some exceptions, but this would mostly seem to be due to supply and demand issues.

Edit:  Of course, March is a five week month, so that should be taken in to account too.I don't really have time to do that right now.

Is March usually a five week period and April usually a 4 week period?

@TheBigFatJ

Yes, I remembered and edited after I posted

I thought the numbers made sense when I first saw them. I don't understand why everyone is in such an uproar over them. I don't think anyone here has shares in these companies.

Yeah I was thinking about this in context of the 54% increase in launch week that MS claimed. It just seems like whatever the % increase there should've been a lot more hardware units moved. Especially when Halo 3 moved like 200k extra 360s in September, while GTA4 only increased like 50k total across two systems.

A 54% increase over a possible 39k week is a 21k increase., which is very consistent with my analysis.

So they increased, but the weekly sales decreased?

It's more like the weekly sales decreased so much early in April that the boost in the last week wasn't enough to bring up the overall weekly average. Which is still bizarre but I guess in line with what's been said.

And that kitten is way too adorable.

No, they just... barely decreased when they should've decreased a buttload.

Making it like an increase on top of a bigger decrease.

Sum total: baby decrease.

Notice the big decreases for DS, PSP, and PS2.