| MikeB said: @ billsalias A goal is the end you hope to achieve with your actions. In this case your action is sharing your opinion, what is it you hope to accomplish by doing so. Better accuracy, like I stated before. This regards all the data here, including the PS2, which I never owned. I hope ioi can find out where the huge gap between sold to retail and reported figures originate from. For example in the past I stated that I expected the PS2 to still be a viable platform in certain markets, VGChartz claimed it was dying quickly. With the console beating both PS3 and 360 last quarter it's obvious VGChartz can be pretty wrong. It's a hobby discussing this stuff for me, to see how well I am able to predict things ahead and such. But in general I am far more a tech person than a sales person. early slim shipments Unlikely, stocking so far ahead costs retailers money. Sony warehous stocking is in theory possible but we are talking about sold to retail figures. pushing stock ahead of the manufacturing switch over Retailers usually only buy new stock when the old stock is nearly running out. That's a very common approach for sales company. timing of shipments such that PS3 had a big shipment right before the end of the quarter Look above. It's cute that you want to change my mind, but sorry your arguments won't. Nor is there really a need or is there? |
Cute? Not even sure what you are trying to say by using that wording. Let's just ignore it and get back to the discussion.
There is no need or desire to convince you, only to use rational discussion to expose the flaws in your argument so that less cautious people do not take as fact what is actually poorly supported theory.
So your goal is to improve the accuracy of the numbers produced by VGChartz? In this particular case lets stay focused on your original statement about 360 and PS3 numbers instead of broadening the topic too much to keep a coherent discussion flowing.
Your claim is that the PS3 in undertracked by ~450k because the numbers as of Jun 30th show that many more PS3s shipped to retail then 360s. Your only reasons supporting this theory are: you think that is too many for retailers to be holding, stores near you are sold out of PS3s and have 360s in stock.
To address your supporting arguments. First the "my store has none" argument has been dismissed as meaningless so many times it hardly is worth repeating but lets be thorough. A single store, region or even country can have radically different stock availability then average for many reasons such as: higer demand in that area for the product, lower orders due to lack of demand, lower shipments due to other regions getting preferential treatment due to market size or importance, poor timing of orders, etc. For every person that see no PS3s I am sure we can find one that see's stacks of them. Just because you do not see them does not mean any statistically significant segment of the population also cannot.
Next lets consider your opinion that there cannot be that many PS3s in stock because the boxes are too big and retailers cannot afford to sit on them. First this is an opinion, we have not seen any information on policies from large retail chains on how they stock PS3s. Second you presume the retailers have a simple formula of buy when stock is low. These are complex processes where they have to predict demand fairly far out and it is quite possible that some reatilers over estimated demand for any number of reasons such as expecting a price cut earlier or expecting some software to drive hardware demand more the it did, or expecting a bounce in the economy to be reflected in higher ticket item sales. Third there are other factors besides demand driving the units ordered such as corporate politics. For an example of when retailers took on far more stock then they needed look at the 360 two christmasses ago when MS stuffed the channel so full that they hardly shipped any units January through June.
Now neither of us has any concrete first hand facts to back up our theories and we are left judging each others arguments based on the viability of the possible schenarios we use to argue our cases. What this means is we are never going to prove one right or wrong.
So now to put all of this in the light of your goal. You want to improve the numbers but you have nothing more then opinion to use to recomend changes, which makes them not improvments in the statistical quality of the numbers representation of reality but an improvment in how well they match your personal perception of reality. So either your goal is to change the numbers to be what you want or your arguments fail to achieve your goal.
