Well, these deals were very specific. You had to trade in either your 360 or PS3 Slim model in order to get the deal. Everything else was either a straight up price cut, a new model, or just trying to keep up with demand.
For me, I look at April and see 2 things. A price drop and trade in deals.
Talking about just the trade in deals, I think it'll have an impact on sales, but not as big as in 2015. While someone can go into Gamestop and get an XB1 for $25 less than they could possibly get for last year, they are the only retailer with the deal, unlike last year where Best Buy came in with a half off trade in deal for a single week. This alone, I think it'll have less impact than last years, but not by a whole lot.
The next though, is the price drop. Sales always spike with a price and there is usually a new baseline for some time before returning back to the old pre price cut baseline. $299 is nothing to sneeze at, and I feel that alone would push Xbox One's much more than TiD's. 4 weeks with a price cut should propel sales, and I think we saw this start in March seeing as normally, March is a ~30% drop from February, and the Xbox One only dropped 22%. That's a 27% difference from the average, so something happened, and it was the price drop, which only had 2 weeks in March.
4 weeks of a price drop + TiD's... hmm. Before, I estimated a slight drop in the weekly average, but now, I want to say the weekly average will go up.
Also I'll just say this, whether or not it's slightly down or up, I think the XB1 will be #1 in April.
Starting in 2010, each console brand, for whatever reason, actually have different averages for the March to April drop. Xbox drops ~25%, Nintendo ~30%, and Playstation ~35%. This averages out to ~30% for everyone, but still, each brand actually stick to a different 5%.
Taking these at face values, this would be what April looks like.
Code:
April 2016
Xbox One: 48,400 * 0.75 * 4 = 145,200
PS4: 66,000 * 0.65 * 4 = 171,600
Wii U: 13,200 * 0.7 * 4 = 36,960
Average 30% drop
Code:
April 2016
Xbox One: 48,400 * 0.7 * 4 = 135,500
PS4: 66,000 * 0.7 * 4 = 184,800
Wii U: 13,200 * 0.7 * 4 = 36,960
To me, PS and Nintendo should have average drops this year, so somewhere around ~170k - ~185k for PS4 and ~35k - ~40k for Wii U.
For XB1, I don't see how it won't do more than the average. Just applying the difference between the average drop and the actual drop the XB1 had in March (27% diff) and applied that to the drops in April:
Code:
April 2016
Brand average drop = 25 * .73 = ~18%
Xbox One: 48,400 * 0.82 * 4 = 158,800
Code:
April 2016
Total average drop = 30 * .73 = ~22%
Xbox One: 48,400 * 0.78 * 4 = 151,000
It gets close to the PS4, and again, that's using a % that we get from a price drop that only had 2 out of 5 weeks in March.
Just a 5% drop and the XB1 is at 184k, or right with the PS4 if it receives a slightly better drop than usual. I think this will be enough for the XB1 to be #1, whether it's by 13k like last year, higher, or lower.
