The issue with the phase was the "well over".
It was clear "well over" was an exaggeration.
Depends on how you define "well over". Since there's no universal definition for that term, well, you just have to chalk it up in the "who cares" department.
Now, to Server.
One thing I've always been curious about is how promotions are handled. If a console is $50 off one week, is that reflected in the ASP?
Yes.
What if it instead includes a $50 gift card, or a game valued at $50?
No.
Did 80% of Bone — or PS4 — sales come on the back of a $50 discount somehow not shown in the 5%/15% ASP drop?
Maybe. Don't know.
Is the ASP as reported by NPD any different from how the platform holders would be booking it in their financials?
Yes. NPD reports retail pricing. Platform holders would book wholesale pricing. Permanent price drops, temporary price drops and bundling usually come out of different costing buckets. So, very different indeed.
In a nutshell, how much of these price drops and promotions are being hidden by the marketing budget?
All NPD reflects is what dollar amount a consumer paid. Not the value the consumer received in return, know what I mean?
ASP doesn't get discussed much, but I don't know if that's because it's super secret, or I'm the only one that actually pays attention to it. lol
It's not super secret. It's just, for some reason, the 1 "P" that gets ignored the most.
On the other hand, if your point was that much like a game of darts, the console business is a competition wherein the outcome is determined almost entirely by the skill of the participants, which allows us to eventually identify the true Champions of the Game, but who's
specific outcomes are governed by factors that can be difficult or even impossible to predetermine, meaning that our predictions can never be truly certain, then I wholeheartedly agree.
That is indeed what I was implying.
Reasonable math is a prerequisite for spin, actually. With bad math, you merely have fiction.
Sure. But then we should be arguing the math, not throwing it out because the conclusions the author derives from the math are ridiculous.
That wasn't really the conclusion of the article though.
I know it wasn't. When I first brought the data point up, I was not referencing or speaking to that article. Someone else brought it up.
Was this strictly necessary?
Poster I was replying to stated pretty clearly that they believed the article to be a trash piece written solely to make the Xbox One look better. It was a very warz stance.
"Seeing a jump to $1.25 from the year-to-date average of $1.18 — especially on third-party games — is a flashing sign to all publishers that Xbox One is a place to make money."
Yeah, I'd call that both shit analysis and spin, to be honest.
I never said the conclusions weren't terrible. I didn't bring the article up.
But to say that the idea of the Xbox One having a higher digital ARPU is false because some article is terrible? Who cares about the dumb article? The data point is the interesting, if not terribly important, bit.
The premise of the entire article seemed to be that ARPU was the most important and telling piece of data, directly telling publishers where their primary focus should be.
Which is dumb. Still doesn't make the ARPU point incorrect.
Just that the higher ARPU isn't particularly meaningful or even unexpected in and of itself, as you seem to agree.
It's completely irrelevant to 100% of consumers/fans and 95% of people working at pubs/1st parties. The only people who should care about those numbers are people in finance projecting revenues by platform, sales planning people and maybe some biz dev. No one else should care even the tiniest little bit about it. Because it doesn't matter in the big picture.
Very interesting indeed. Kudos, GameStop. <3
People give GameStop a lot of grief here. But no company pushes consumer rights more than GameStop, crazy as that might sound.
Details we weren't meant to notice, no doubt.
Everything at the time happened so fast, from the reveal to the 180, driven by all these complications in execution and the brutal consumer feedback. Had the gap between reveal and 180 been extended it's easy to imagine a scenario where this stuff would have been talked about much more. Of course it would have had to been talked about more, since no one (consumers, retailers, publishers, hell probably MS itself) understood how it was all supposed to work in the real world.
