I'd love to see any of you guys attempt to work out NPD results with the little we get every month and actually be close
My estimates were perfectly fine up until September where PS5 started improving better than I thought, and November was a literal shot in the dark as there was nothing to work with. I've never been confident on those November estimates but they were what I thought to be the most probable. No one expected Xbox to be that low and even then, all of my other PS5 estimates were within 10% (June and August 3%, July and September 7%, 10% November) except October at 12%.
Similarly my Xbox estimates were super close up to September, having it exactly correct in June, 5% and 4% off in July and August, 10% in September, and 16% in October. Clearly September was a shift in PS5's direction greater than what I expected. My estimates had PS5 continually gaining share up to a peak of 59% in September, but a fall towards 56% in October in November. How am I supposed to know that Xbox just flopped in the holidays when that was never the trend at any point ever?
When Aqua last shared numbers in May, this is what I had worked out each month prior to her leak, compared to what the real results were
Xbox
Jan: 320,000 (Off 13K)
Feb: 300,000 (Off 39K)
Mar: 500,000 (Off 11K)
Apr: 280,000 (Off 13K)
May: 210,000 (Off 33K)
PS5
Jan: 370,000 (Off 1K)
Feb: 150,000 (Off 22K)
Mar: 260,000 (Off 22K)
Apr: 230,000 (Off 4K)
May: 120,000 (Off 1K)
So I don't want to hear anything about me tending to underestimate PS5. From January to August 2022 I was near spot on every month. Xbox is harder to get right when calculating units and revenue as the Series S and X splits vary much more than the stagnant PS5 to DE split. I just over estimated Series S somewhat before September.
No bad feelings Welfare; FWIW I respect what you do. While your Xbox numbers may sometimes skew a tad too high, at least you do correct them and don't get ridiculous about it. Something I absolutely cannot say for the VGChartz guy, where they grossly overestimate Xbox numbers time and again (and constantly underestimate Sony & Nintendo ones).
Just a question: what amount of Xbox's market share would you say US & UK account for? I've assumed it's 60%, but it might be slightly more. In the 360 gen those two markets combined accounted for slightly over 65% of 360's total sales. Given XBO did even worst in some international markets than 360, I guess one could say it's even higher now or at best would be between 60% and 65%.
We don't have any solid December numbers or either system, but apparently someone else on InstalledBase guessimated 900K for Xbox Series in US. Don't know what their methodology is, but I'm just leaning with that. Unfortunately we don't have UK numbers, but do you think throwing 2 million in sales for Xbox in that market for 2022 is being overly generous, considering the time it took them to reach 1 million (end of 2021) and that 2022 was a less eventful year for them than 2021? TBH I was just being charitable but it might be better to shift half of that to ROTW combined markets (China, India, South Africa, Egypt etc.).
There's little reason to think Xbox has seen any substantial uptick in any of these places; maybe they're doing a bit better in Brazil but I don't see how that would account for much. So with all that said, what's the probability you'd say Series are currently tracking behind XBO? Because IIRC that reached 18 million "activated" devices by January 2016 (its 26th month) and no matter how you calculate Serie's numbers, even with being overly generous on UK and giving ROTW 40% of the system's market share, you still come up short of 18 million.
But I'd just like to hear your thoughts on that, if interested. And Aqua's a godsend for the leak, even if we don't get December's. It's helped a LOT.