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NPD Sales Results for November 2015 [Up3: Combined Hardware For PS4 + XB1 + Wii U]

gtj1092

Member
Or cash in on people that are less price-sensitive so close to Christmas?


Yeah my buddy was bragging he got a BF bundle on Monday. He payed $349. I was like they were $299 for the last two weeks. But he said he didn't want it till he saw TFA on Sunday.
 
Consoles will be dead in January. Then they'll have a surprising surge in February that people will try to attribute to some game of their choice. Then there will be a muted March that's not as up from February as many expect. Then it'll lead into the slow decline of April, May, bump in June with some new bundle or whatever (again), continue declining in July, August, price drop or something in September, "preseason over" in October, and right back around to wowser, wowser November again.
Pretty much.

I'll be eye rolling all the way through until next holiday.
 

Shenmue

Banned
seems strange sony didn't extend the sale through the end of the year. might as well cash in on as many sales as possible right?

Or cash in on people that are less price-sensitive so close to Christmas?

Anecdotal, but at least near me it does seem like it is going to hurt their sales for the last half of December.

I went to 3 Best Buys around the area to pick up items I had ordered and saw about 5-6 Xbox Ones in the pick-up holding area at each store, but only 0 or 1 PS4. Prior to the price increase it was pretty much the reverse.

Best Buy makes up a pretty small portion of the video game retail market though so it doesn't really mean much one way or another, but I'd imagine Xbox has been outselling the PS4 since the price went back up everywhere. Only question is if PS4 built up enough of a lead in the first half of December to still sell the most this month.

My guess is that it'll be extremely close with the Xbox winning by a tiny bit for December.
 

Abdiel

Member
Anecdotal, but at least near me it does seem like it is going to hurt their sales for the last half of December.

I went to 3 Best Buys around the area to pick up items I had ordered and saw about 5-6 Xbox Ones in the pick-up holding area at each store, but only 0 or 1 PS4. Prior to the price increase it was pretty much the reverse.

Best Buy makes up a pretty small portion of the video game retail market though so it doesn't really mean much one way or another, but I'd imagine Xbox has been outselling the PS4 since the price went back up everywhere. Only question is if PS4 built up enough of a lead in the first half of December to still sell the most this month.

My guess is that it'll be extremely close with the Xbox winning by a tiny bit for December.

Ehh...

People are still buying PS4s. And you don't really understand the difference in momentum between the two leading up to this week, the PS4 was *killing it*. It's been a drop off by comparison, definitely, but nothing in what I'm seeing from our districts would lead them to somehow win the month just from them extending their sale on the XB1 for a few more days, so to speak. It's a much larger spectrum.

I'll make a final speculation closer to the end of the month, but nothing in terms of what we're seeing in this week's sales is going to close the difference.

Edit: Also - Anything in the store pickup section can be misleading, because it can be held there for up to to a week. Some people are really lazy, and others are really urgent. Yes, it's a crazy time of year, but you have no idea how much of that product sits there when people order stuff while its on sale, and then wait til the last minute to come in and pick it up before it is cancelled.
 

Opt1kon_

Member
Happy birthday!

I'll take it.

Hmm, it would be highly interesting™ if this were the case all over. Last year, the X1 price gave it the edge. So, would it be that the third party deals and marketing from Sony is strong enough to cancel out the lower price of X1 for this short period of time?

Thats the thing, I asked 1 customer today, why'd they choose the $349.99 PS4 SWB Bundle over the Gears bundle and they simply said They saw the star wars movie, my question is, by any chance does it effect some customers or all, not only that but now the battlefront bundles are actually selling out again at my store (idk about the rest of my district) And we have a lot more Blackops3 bundles left over so if I could remember of the top of my head id say in the stock room we have about 22 battlefront PS4 bundles (we had 40 vs 40 BLOPS3 bundles (minus 9 we sold prior ) we do have the customers asking for the xobxone elite bundle though and they really want that bundle overall which in MY OPINION is strange because its priced well above the $299 gears bundle
 
Through September it was just fewer. I'll run again in January to get the full year and I'll post the full title and score lists.
This actually got me thinking about some numbers that came up earlier in the thread that I'd meant to examine more closely but never did…

Cumulative lifetime-to-date physical software tie-ratios for the Microsoft Xbox One (4.8) were above those of the Sony PlayStation 4 (4.7) as of the November 2015 U.S. Games Industry Report from The NPD Group.
Cumulative:
PS3 2008 - 6.1
X360 2007 - 7.0

[WiiU] 4.3 Cumulative vs Wii 2008 6.0
Well, here are the comparable # of games released for each platform:

PS4 Release Count (as of Sept 2015) - 156
PS3 Release Count through Dec 2008 - 225

Xbox One Release Count (as of Sept 2015) - 129
Xbox 360 Release Count through Dec 2007 - 217

Wii U Release Count (as of Sept 2015) - 120
Wii Release Count through Dec 2008 - 458
Packaged sales and Packaged release count correlate at a .97 r-squared since 2009. There's a very reasonable cause and effect thing here.
So we have this for our two-year measurements:
Code:
	Releases 	Tie Ratio	Releases/Buy/Console
PS3	225		6.1		36.9
PS4	156		4.7		33.2
XB2	217		7.0		31.0
XB3	129		4.8		26.9
Wii	458		6.0		76.3
WiU	120		4.3		27.9

I never took Prob&Stat, but I imagined "correlates at .97 r-squared" to mean something like the correlation I see between my throttle and my tach. Does ".97 r-squared" actually mean "97% Relative Randomness" or something? =/

In case that last metric isn't clear, it's how many games needed to be released on that platform before all of the platform owners said, "Yeah, I'll go ahead and get a new game," thereby increasing that platform's tie ratio by 1.0. There doesn't seem to be a strong correlation here, unless the correlation is "tie ratio goes up by one for every 30ish releases, give or take a half dozen, or sometimes three dozen."
 

Shenmue

Banned
Ehh...

People are still buying PS4s. And you don't really understand the difference in momentum between the two leading up to this week, the PS4 was *killing it*. It's been a drop off by comparison, definitely, but nothing in what I'm seeing from our districts would lead them to somehow win the month just from them extending their sale on the XB1 for a few more days, so to speak. It's a much larger spectrum.

I'll make a final speculation closer to the end of the month, but nothing in terms of what we're seeing in this week's sales is going to close the difference.

Edit: Also - Anything in the store pickup section can be misleading, because it can be held there for up to to a week. Some people are really lazy, and others are really urgent. Yes, it's a crazy time of year, but you have no idea how much of that product sits there when people order stuff while its on sale, and then wait til the last minute to come in and pick it up before it is cancelled.

Ah I see. Wow no idea people did that because I always go pick up my thing pretty much at 10:00 am the day it's available. Today it was for Trails in the Cold Steel of course!

Thank you very much for the insight as always Abdiel!
 

Game Guru

Member
Consoles will be dead in January. Then they'll have a surprising surge in February that people will try to attribute to some game of their choice. Then there will be a muted March that's not as up from February as many expect. Then it'll lead into the slow decline of April, May, bump in June with some new bundle or whatever (again), continue declining in July, August, price drop or something in September, "preseason over" in October, and right back around to wowser, wowser November again.

To be fair, consoles have become a very seasonal thing. October to December is where all the major console releases of the year generally congregate. It's like how the Summer Blockbusters congregate in summer, with the current Star Wars film being one of the few successful exceptions since it's in Oscar Season instead.
 

stryke

Member
To be fair, consoles have become a very seasonal thing. October to December is where all the major console releases of the year generally congregate. It's like how the Summer Blockbusters congregate in summer, with the current Star Wars film being one of the few successful exceptions since it's in Oscar Season instead.

I'm not sure how you can describe it as becoming seasonal. It's always been seasonal. It's just that there used to be a lot more of it.
 

Abdiel

Member
Ah I see. Wow no idea people did that because I always go pick up my thing pretty much at 10:00 am the day it's available. Today it was for Trails in the Cold Steel of course!

Thank you very much for the insight as always Abdiel!

Same here, sir. Though my copy was staring at me from my coat pocket all day until my shift was over haha. I wish more people were aware of the game, to be ordering/picking it up, too.

And yeah, you'd be surprised how lazy some folks are with their store pickups. Product will just sit there for days on end. But that's really hit or miss. Sometimes it's a line of people for store pickup items, other times it's just stuff that sits and waits. There's no guarantee for any store how long any items have or will be sitting there for pickup.
 

simplayer

Member
I never took Prob&Stat, but I imagined "correlates at .97 r-squared" to mean something like the correlation I see between my throttle and my tach. Does ".97 r-squared" actually mean "97% Relative Randomness" or something? =/

R-squared is a statistical measure of how close the data are to the fitted regression line. It is also known as the coefficient of determination, or the coefficient of multiple determination for multiple regression. 0% indicates that the model explains none of the variability of the response data around its mean.

1.0 would be a perfect fit of data to the extrapolated linear fit (the line you're trying to fit the data to). 0.97 is quite close, so the variables are highly correlated
 
R-squared is a statistical measure of how close the data are to the fitted regression line. It is also known as the coefficient of determination, or the coefficient of multiple determination for multiple regression. 0% indicates that the model explains none of the variability of the response data around its mean.

1.0 would be a perfect fit of data to the extrapolated linear fit (the line you're trying to fit the data to). 0.97 is quite close, so the variables are highly correlated
Ah, thanks. And does this data fit that? How is r-squared calculated? I'm not even entirely sure what a regression line is, to be honest.

From my layman's perspective, there really seems to be very little correlation between release counts and sales. In Gen 7, Wii had twice as many games as the other two, yet had the lowest tie ratio, while XB2 had the fewest games, yet the highest tie ratio by far. This generation, PS4 has 20% more games available than XB3, yet its tie ratio is slightly lower.

So I'm not really seeing how releasing more games creates proportionally more sales. If anything, it seems like having too many games available actually lowers your tie ratios.
 

Welfare

Member
Thanks for all the happy birthdays!

Ah, thanks. And does this data fit that? How is r-squared calculated? I'm not even entirely sure what a regression line is, to be honest.

From my layman's perspective, there really seems to be very little correlation between release counts and sales. In Gen 7, Wii had twice as many games as the other two, yet had the lowest tie ratio, while XB2 had the fewest games, yet the highest tie ratio by far. This generation, PS4 has 20% more games available than XB3, yet its tie ratio is slightly lower.

So I'm not really seeing how releasing more games creates proportionally more sales. If anything, it seems like having too many games available actually lowers your tie ratios.

I don't research the software side of things too much, but I would assume that the amount of games doesn't matter as much as it does the amount of games in a genre that the player base of a console supports.

The PS4 might have more games than the Xbox One, but depending on the genre of said games, those 20% more games on the PS4 might not drive consumers to purchase them because it (genre) does not fill their needs.

While on the Xbox One side, while having less games overall, what it does have in plenty is shooters. Xbox owners love like 2 things, sports and shooters, so even with less games overall, because the core base of Xbox favors shooters (and sports), they'll pick those up in spades, while another genre (JRPG) is almost ignored on the platform.

As long as the player base of the console gets games in the genre that is favored the most, I think the tie ratio will be "good".

Or I can be completely off base with this.
 

hawk2025

Member
Ah, thanks. And does this data fit that? How is r-squared calculated? I'm not even entirely sure what a regression line is, to be honest.

From my layman's perspective, there really seems to be very little correlation between release counts and sales. In Gen 7, Wii had twice as many games as the other two, yet had the lowest tie ratio, while XB2 had the fewest games, yet the highest tie ratio by far. This generation, PS4 has 20% more games available than XB3, yet its tie ratio is slightly lower.

So I'm not really seeing how releasing more games creates proportionally more sales. If anything, it seems like having too many games available actually lowers your tie ratios.


Roughly, when there is only one variable, the coefficient of a regression line is the covariance between the two variables normalized by the variance of the independent variable (in this example, number of releases).

The R^2 is the total variation in the data (this case: sales) that can be predicted in a linear fashion by the independent variable (this case: number of releases).
 
I don't research the software side of things too much, but I would assume that the amount of games doesn't matter as much as it does the amount of games in a genre that the player base of a console supports.

The PS4 might have more games than the Xbox One, but depending on the genre of said games, those 20% more games on the PS4 might not drive consumers to purchase them because it (genre) does not fill their needs.

While on the Xbox One side, while having less games overall, what it does have in plenty is shooters. Xbox owners love like 2 things, sports and shooters, so even with less games overall, because the core base of Xbox favors shooters (and sports), they'll pick those up in spades, while another genre (JRPG) is almost ignored on the platform.

As long as the player base of the console gets games in the genre that is favored the most, I think the tie ratio will be "good".

Or I can be completely off base with this.
Sure, genres will factor in. If the US PS4-owning population collectively has zero interest in JRPGs, then a bunch of JRPG releases isn't going to increase Sony's software sales. The weird thing is, the existence of the JRPGs seems to be causing PS4 owners to walk out of the store with nothing; those extra games make them buy less software per-console than Bone owners.

Queso has been arguing that more physical releases means more physical sales. No one really disputes that, but diminishing returns, etc. However, Queso seemed to be arguing — and I may be completely misunderstanding him again — that the returns are actually fairly linear. But it actually sounds like that as release counts go up, per-title sales actually go down. Sales-per-release seems to go down as release counts go up. PS4 has more games than Bone, but PS4 owners buy less games. Wii had twice as many games as the 360 did — giving Wii owners far more choice — but only 86% as many games sold per console. Analysis paralysis? I dunno; it's counter-intuitive.


Roughly, when there is only one variable, the coefficient of a regression line is the covariance between the two variables normalized by the variance of the independent variable (in this example, number of releases).

The R^2 is the total variation in the data (this case: sales) that can be predicted in a linear fashion by the independent variable (this case: number of releases).
Like I said, I never took Prob & Stat, so I looked up what covariance meant, and I'm guessing you're saying that we need to find the mean for the release counts, and the mean for the tie ratios, and then see how much those two means deviate from each other? How do we do that, using the numbers we have? Like, can you walk me through it? <3
 

noobie

Banned
Same here, sir. Though my copy was staring at me from my coat pocket all day until my shift was over haha. I wish more people were aware of the game, to be ordering/picking it up, too.

And yeah, you'd be surprised how lazy some folks are with their store pickups. Product will just sit there for days on end. But that's really hit or miss. Sometimes it's a line of people for store pickup items, other times it's just stuff that sits and waits. There's no guarantee for any store how long any items have or will be sitting there for pickup.

can you tell me how much return or exchange effect after the Christmas day (26 Dec)? how much impact it cause in final numbers for one item in relation to another item?
 
Ah I see. Wow no idea people did that because I always go pick up my thing pretty much at 10:00 am the day it's available. Today it was for Trails in the Cold Steel of course!

Thank you very much for the insight as always Abdiel!

Like the "9 digital friends" one this is also a good example to illustrate that single oberservations are not an eligible way to predict sales :). It's kinda cool to have guys like Abdiel around who can (and do) provide us with a bigger picture on what's going on behind the curtains. Thanks a lot for that.

Then again, even without Abdiel's insights predicting who'll win December is not a though one at all.
 

Joni

Member
Doesn't the most popular console always tend to have the lower tie ratio as it tends to sell to a wider audience?
 
It's just amazing that people prefer the PS4 over the cheaper XboxOne because of Star Wars if they do not care about anything other than the game.
As if they could not buy the Gears console plus Battlefront for the same price as the Battlefront PS4 without a second game.
It should be obvious that the game is multiplat, but an AT-AT on the box seems to do wonders.
Marketing is miraculous.
 

Hydrargyrus

Member
It's just amazing that people prefer the PS4 over the cheaper XboxOne because of Star Wars if they do not care about anything other than the game.
As if they could not buy the Gears console plus Battlefront for the same price as the Battlefront PS4 without a second game.
It should be obvious that the game is multiplat, but an AT-AT on the box seems to do wonders.
Marketing is miraculous.

Maybe they evaluate more reasons apart of the price...
 

mejin

Member
]It's just amazing that people prefer the PS4 over the cheaper XboxOne[/B] because of Star Wars if they do not care about anything other than the game.
As if they could not buy the Gears console plus Battlefront for the same price as the Battlefront PS4 without a second game.
It should be obvious that the game is multiplat, but an AT-AT on the box seems to do wonders.
Marketing is miraculous.

We saw it all along the year. We are just back to the status quo.
 

AerialAir

Banned
6rMaV3DYufVmqLbi3MRMFFc1E9L2V.jpg

Damn, I was hopping for a GOTY release with all the DLC by the time it came to the beast slayer P$4.
 

tzare

Member
It's just amazing that people prefer the PS4 over the cheaper XboxOne because of Star Wars if they do not care about anything other than the game.
As if they could not buy the Gears console plus Battlefront for the same price as the Battlefront PS4 without a second game.
It should be obvious that the game is multiplat, but an AT-AT on the box seems to do wonders.
Marketing is miraculous.

by that logic XBOX One should've sold zero consoles for people who purchased multiplatform games at launch since it was way more expensive than the more powerful PS4
 
It's just amazing that people prefer the PS4 over the cheaper XboxOne because of Star Wars if they do not care about anything other than the game.
As if they could not buy the Gears console plus Battlefront for the same price as the Battlefront PS4 without a second game.
It should be obvious that the game is multiplat, but an AT-AT on the box seems to do wonders.
Marketing is miraculous.
Yep, MS should "bundle" it with deals like crazy. Sony really has taken all the best marketing deals this Gen.
 
According to wikipedia, PS4 has 40+% more games than Xbone. Well, tie ratio is slightly lower cuz Xbone is a half of the PS4's user base.
Sorry, I was referring specifically to the packaged release counts that were posted earlier. Also, it's US-only, so the market share split isn't as pronounced as you claim. :)
 

le.phat

Member
It's just amazing that people prefer the PS4 over the cheaper XboxOne because of Star Wars if they do not care about anything other than the game.
As if they could not buy the Gears console plus Battlefront for the same price as the Battlefront PS4 without a second game.
It should be obvious that the game is multiplat, but an AT-AT on the box seems to do wonders.
Marketing is miraculous.


The consoles are more then a sum of their games. PS4 version has the limited edition, a number or classic star wars rereleases, the better version of the game. And that is besides the fact that far and away most people play the game on PS4, meaning the whole friend thing ties in fairly strong as well.
 

sense

Member
can you tell me how much return or exchange effect after the Christmas day (26 Dec)? how much impact it cause in final numbers for one item in relation to another item?

it's a trap. ps4's will be returned en masse after the holidays causing the warehouses to be restocked for the next quarter!!!
 

johnny956

Member
Anecdotal, but at least near me it does seem like it is going to hurt their sales for the last half of December.

I went to 3 Best Buys around the area to pick up items I had ordered and saw about 5-6 Xbox Ones in the pick-up holding area at each store, but only 0 or 1 PS4. Prior to the price increase it was pretty much the reverse.

Best Buy makes up a pretty small portion of the video game retail market though so it doesn't really mean much one way or another, but I'd imagine Xbox has been outselling the PS4 since the price went back up everywhere. Only question is if PS4 built up enough of a lead in the first half of December to still sell the most this month.

My guess is that it'll be extremely close with the Xbox winning by a tiny bit for December.

Best Buy is also doing $50 gift card with Battlefront and Uncharted bundles (not the Black Ops bundle)
 
A quick look at the Amazon hourly. It's been pretty much like this for the last few days.

As Abdiel suggested from its own observations, the lead of the Xbox One seems really too thin to make up for the gap of the rest of the month, here on Amazon.

#12 Xbox One Gears of War [299$]
#17 PS4 Black Ops III [349$]
#20 PS4 Star Wars [349$]
#35 Xbox One Gears/Ori/Rare [349$]
 
Best Buy is also doing $50 gift card with Battlefront and Uncharted bundles (not the Black Ops bundle)

That may explain what I saw at my local Best Buy the other day. There was a pallet with one PS4 BF bundle on it while there was a pallet with roughly 20+ XB Elites and another with about the same amount of XB triple game bundles. There were also about 50 XB triple game bundles lined up by the Customer Service area as well.

Edit: I suppose It's worth mentioning, since the store is located in Miami, FL, that a good number of customers that are purchasing PS4s seem to be visiting from central and South American countries. It's apparently cheaper, especially for Brazilians, to actually travel to miami to buy a PS4 than buy it in Brazil.

In other words, I think it's safe to assume that my Best Buy is definitely not representative of other locations.
 

N.Domixis

Banned
ms will lose the holidays, should have focused on the other 8 months. This is the only time they have to catch up. I expect the gap to widen to 2 million by next year if they lose DEC NPD

No I was right the spelling is lose.

Another thing is that they were pretty close for most to the months this year. If they would have spread out their exclusives and marketed more and did more deals they would have won many more months. And then come the holidays,a loss of a few hundreds k's wouldn't have been as bad.
 

allan-bh

Member
ms will lose the holidays, should have focused on the other 8 months. This is the only time they have to catch up. I expect the gap to widen to 2 million by next year if they lose DEC NPD

No I was right the spelling is lose.

Another thing is that they were pretty close for most to the months this year. If they would have spread out their exclusives and marketed more and did more deals they would have won many more months. And then come the holidays,a loss of a few hundreds k's wouldn't have been as bad.

They could have won some months but sell less in holidays. In the end they want to sell the biggest amount of consoles as possible every year, win NPD in a slow month isn't exactly what drives a company.
 

Curufinwe

Member
They could have won some months but sell less in holidays. In the end they want to sell the biggest amount of consoles as possible every year, win NPD in a slow month isn't exactly what drives a company.

Yes. Counting that as a success would be signs of a looser mentality.
 

Yurikerr

This post isn't by me, it's by a guy with the same username as me.
It's apparently cheaper, especially for Brazilians, to actually travel to miami to buy a PS4 than buy it in Brazil.

With the new official price on the brazillian manufactured PS4 and the rise of the exchange rate is not cheaper anymore.

You can now buy a ps4 for roughly $399/449 in trusted online stores in brazil now.
 
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