Sony Ships 1 Million Moves in America - News

@AwesomeElmo

"In stock! That took me 10 seconds to find."

1 - Most of the comments about stockouts are from several days (if not weeks) ago.
2 - You're considering the Starter Pack, which people said it was the one that was more available.


"And why does shipped != sold?"

The question should be: why does shipped is 4 times bigger than sold? Do you think Sony is an amateur in business to the point that it would ship 1M without knowing how big is the demand? Do you make an idea how far can go the logistics costs (and mainly the storing costs) and how pressured are the companies of products to minimize them? Looking at some of your sentences (e.g. "This would be considered a massive flop."), I'm sure you don't.


"But don't go spreading wild speculation at best and flat out lies at worst."

If the comments about stock outs are lies, then why Sony has planned to increase the production? Lets see:
1 - Sony ships 2.5M.
2 - Only 600k were sold.
3 - Sony reacts: "We are not producing with enough speed! We must increase it!"
Are they crazy?

To people who think that move is sold out, you honestly can't have looked very hard:

http://www.walmart.com/ip/Sony-Move-Bundle/15162326

In stock! That took me 10 seconds to find.

I think you're either picking random outlier comments or you're just flat out lying.

And why does shipped != sold? I'll tell you why: if sold to consumers doesn't reach shipped to retailers than "no more items will be sold". That is, if the sold numbers (lets take vgchartz estimate of ~200k) never reaches 1 million, then the ltd sales of move (by Sony) will be 1 million. This would be considered a massive flop.

Now I'm not suggesting that Move won't sell more than 1 million in the states. But don't go spreading wild speculation at best and flat out lies at worst.

@yog-sothot they dont always take products that dont sell back here either lol... depends on what it is, for things such as consoles, which are sold at a loss, companies take them back because retail doesnt make much (if any in some cases) money on them.

many retail stores would let others take the risk and simply not sell them if it werent for manufacturers giving this kind of incentive.

jezze_jamez

"And yes, companies do take back products that don't sell"

you may "KNOW THIS FOR A FACT" but this is absolutely not a general rule. Maybe in the US, but definitely not in Europe. As I said earlier, it totally depends on the type of products, the country (possibly) and who's got the power in negociations.

@jezze_jamez
Exactly where in my previous posts did I ever mention that shipped meant sold to customers?

@theredsoldier
You are talking figures and I was talking definitions, so in that case it can never be simple because we are talking different things...but I do get your point.

Some comments here are just...

@jezze_jamez
look.. I specifically told you ...in Europe. I know the unsane procedures American retailers operate on. I had my first retailer experience over thirty years ago, being part of building a company from the ground up. Several of my colleagues have built their own retail shop businesses since. Don't tell me anything about retail, been there, done that. Why do you think MediaMarkts here were sitting on unsold XBox Elites for months after the slim was announced? _I was _there when they dropped the price 50% to get rid of them - because MS does not take back stock. Again, this is the rule in Europe, no manufacturer takes back unsold stock - whatever the product is. It is the retailers problem to sell what he orders.

cant find move controllers anywhere... not online or in stores, looked everywhere that i thought would have them...
found a few online listed for 80-90$ lol

@scat398

"Sony shipped 1 million units which everyone believes a unit represents one controller or one sub controller or one eye toy"

Look at the tittle, buddy: "1 Million Moves". They don't talk about sub-controllers or PlayStation Eyes (it's not EyeToy Cameo anymore). They talk about Moves, which are those controllers with the light ball. And VG Chartz claims that, instead of 1M, there were been sold 252k, which is 4 times less. In Europe's case, instead of 1.5M, VG Chartz presents 348k, which is 4.3 times less.

The mystery continues.

@drkohler

God here we go. If you ran retail you'd be broke. See your problem is your missing a few things. You have to remember Sony,Nintendo,MS are BILLION dollar companies. NOT retailers. Yes they can afford to front product to retailers...whats $500,000.00 to them?

Do you think retailers give a crap if Move sells? No, because it's not their product. It's Sony's. Thats why Sony and every other company in the world make it easy for them to sell. Companies will front the product and pay for the advertising in store. Your acting like a $10,000.00 cheque to Sony a few weeks will bankrupt them...lol. Obviously you have never been in retail...cause you have no idea what your talking about. And yes, companies do take back products that don't sell, For example milk,newspapers and things like that, that expire fast are returned to the manufacturer...think about it. I KNOW THIS FOR FACT BUDDY ! Video games however have a long shelf life. But in order to sell a video game thats a year old, Sony will advise retail to cut the price. Because its not retails product...it's Sony's. You can look at it however you want, the fact is Shipped is different from Sales....don't let your Playstation Fanboyism blind you....it's making you look stupid. BTW thers maybe spelling mistakes in here...i'm pissed drunk :)

I think the way an industry deals with unsold units really depends on who has the power on the negociations. I don't believe there is a general rule. And I honestly don't know what's the situation with videogames, I'd say it depends on who we're talking about : Walmart or some small shop ? Nintendo or some unknown publisher ?

Look when the shops decrease prices of clothes and other stuff at the beginnig of the year to make space in their stocks, why would retail do that if the manufacturer had to take his stuff back ?

In the past, videogames manufacturers used to take back the unsold games, in exchange of cash or newer games. This was already the case within the toy industry and, back then, toys corporations had heavily invested in the gaming industry.

This was one of the main reasons of the crash of the industry in 1983 (with the overflowing releases of shitty games, poor management and popularity of microcomputers against the consoles).

I guess that since then, the game makers have become much more careful with that kind of deal

let's get straight to the point!?

is PS MOVE selling? yes

is this having/will have any significant impact on hardware sales? NO

Sony is 3rd this gen, even if PS MOVE sells 20 million

how is something not right with VG numbers? Sony shipped 1 million units which everyone believes a unit represents one controller or one sub controller or one eye toy. Actual install base in America around 200K sounds about right to me.

@drkohler

"1.5-2.0 times vgchartz numbers"? How about 4.3 times? Did you "have these discussions in several threads already"? Because that is what's happening with Move.

Something is not right here and nobody was still able to give a good explanation.

jezze_jamez

For goodness sake.. hope you never go into the retail business. Do you honestly think Sony/MS/any manufacturer gives distributors their stuff essentially for free and waits, probably for weeks, until some money dribbles back? ..and takes unsold stuff back?. That's not how it works in the real word (at least not in Europe/Asia).

At this time, Whatever Sony manufactures is taken by the retailers. And in Europe probably >75% of all units are sold through to end users. Actual numbers are likely 1.5-2.0 times vgchartz numbers but we have these discussions in several threads already...

LOL look @ the haters burn.

Whaaa!! wha!!! Sony lies WHAA!!!

rofl burn baby burn!!

This looks good for Sony, it should be interesting to see sales figures....

I'm doing a bit of surfing now and it seems that Sony originally claimed it was sold units, not shipped. The combination of America and Latin America is also being noted as relevant.

That said though, it's just marketing tactics, it's nothing new, just being picked on because it's rather high profile.

But yeah, Sony will probably only publish shipping figures. I don't know why so many people are claiming out of stock, unless they are overshipping to some places and undershipping to others to make it seem like it's in higher demand? /conspiracy theory.

I think Move sales will pick up considerably this time next year though, due to software being available for it.

@justinian

Your wrong. Shipped does NOT mean sold to customers.....really that simple. Let me explain. When a retail company gets Consoles, games etc from Sony, Sony will invoice them for the items that were shipped to them. Sony will not get a cent. Do u think a retail company will order 10,000 units at $49.99...and just hand a cheque to Sony for $499,000.00? If that were the case, retail companies would be broke within a week. An item is not sold, until it is sold to the customer. Because that is the only time it generates revenue. Whats the point of investing money in something that might just sit on the shelf. When items are sold, the company will then send part of that money back to Sony, that maybe every week, month.....but only when it has sold. Thats how business works, from Cars to Milk, to Newspapers. Items that don't sell are shipped back to the manufacturer. So no shipped is very different from sold.

@wanderson75

Good story, but is it about something new? Did not Wii faced exactly the same situation? I don't know to which extent do you consider game developers will be hurt, but seeing the Wii case: most first-parties got huge sales while most third-parties got not enough sales to continue to support Wii. Also, I don't know to which extent do you consider long-term will be compromised, but taking the Wii case again as a reference: 3 years of good strength + 1 reasonable year don't seem bad to me. However, in this case, I think Move will be more long-term because it will also tackle hardcore market. I think you're exagerating in your worries about Move.

About your false claims, do you want another one? Your assumption that Move owners have in average 3 units and that's why 500k (near from those 470k presented by VG Chartz) lead to those 1.5M presented by Sony. Actually, VG Chartz also claimed that the total Move units sold were 600k (very different from 1.5M, isn't it?).

"PlayStation Move is the most recent example of how product innovation continues to provide our customers with new and exciting ways to enjoy our technology" LOL!

@ippanjin22

"Can you imagine having to report (while hooked up to a lie detector, no doubt) how many Moves you already have and, who you are buying each Move for and with whose money? Maybe you share one Move with your 8 housemates. Or, maybe you buy 10 for your Sony collection."

O...K....I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not.

Why do we want to keep it that way? If the number of controllers is skewing the actual number of users, it's skewing relevant data for determining whether or not you actually want to market to that product line. If anything, you want to make sure you keep it as accurate as possible to be able to give your third parties solid data to convince them to make software for your product. Right now the data is murky at best.

By the way, to date McDonalds has sold over 245 billion burgers to date. There are McDonald's signs that actually go to over 100 billion served. They stopped updating the signs after that. The 1 billionth burger was actually sold in 1963. They were at 95 billion in 1993.

Anyway, like I said, having the individual controller sales is great news for Sony. But for statistical and marketing purposes, you really need those unique owners numbers.

LOL

Not again the ''Sold to retailers'' vs. ''Sold to consumers'' debate. Really, I think some people would never learn...or maybe they just don't want to learn.

Of course, there is no way of knowing how many individuals own at least one Move. And, we want to keep it that way, don't we? Can you imagine having to report (while hooked up to a lie detector, no doubt) how many Moves you already have and, who you are buying each Move for and with whose money? Maybe you share one Move with your 8 housemates. Or, maybe you buy 10 for your Sony collection. Take another example. When McDonalds says "over 1 billion served", I assume they mean customers. How did they come up with that number? Are counting people at the registers? Are they including repeat customers? I'm sure of it. How many individuals have eaten a Big Mac? We'll never know. And that's okay. Because some people split them with others, and some people get more than one. Life's complicated that way.

@durbacher

In my first case I said, "As a developer, you count largely on the number of people that actually has the system or platform it runs on. Now while 1.5 million units to Sony can look good, there's no real way for us to tell exactly how many people actually OWN Move. '

"So I spend all this money to develop a game and push it out to the public. It's an awesome game and gets glam reviews! Half the owners of the Move buy it! And I sell 250k units"

Meaning that because your number of hardware units is so far skewing the stats, to sell such a low number of units of software to the available hardware can make your software look bad.

In the second case, I said, "Now with the way you have packaged your units, your attach rate is also skewed. Because now, they've sold 600,000 units to 480,000 unique users. Because you're selling more hardware units than you are software, the attach rate will very quickly be less than 1. Which doesn't look attractive to developers at all."

Meaning, that the total amount of software (across the board, not a single title) can very easily be less than the total number of hardware units you sell or the attach rate is just horribly low, provided you sell a large enough volume.

I'm very well aware that it's not possible to sell more of a single title than there are hardware units. I would assume that the people that I'm writing to would understand that as well.

Erm... wanderson75...

"Rule of thumb, you sell more software (blades) for the console vs. hardware (razors). [...] Now with the way Move is bundled (one controller per unit), that's reversed. You'll be selling more Razors than you will Blades."

That's wrong.
In the first case you mean: "you sell more games in total than consoles" - which is true. But you will NOT sell a particular game like Killzone3 more times than there are consoles! Each game will only sell to a tiny fraction of all console owners.
In the second case you are suddenly counting how many times ONE game sells and you state that this will surely be less than the number of Moves. But certainly there will be more games sold in total than Moves! (actually I think this is already the case).

So compare apples with apples, please.

@TheFlyingDutchman
So you're saying that VGChartz is spinning bad data? What other false claims are you speaking of?

@ Wanderson75: Just be glad you didn't post it on your blog.
Too much false claims, guessing and a lot of bad sources.

The real numbers on Move can only be guessed, but nobody can tell for sure besides Sony.
Many websites tried to calculate, but not one had a decent story with the calculation.
The fact that there are too much wrong numbers going round (they can't all be right) confirms this.

Spin Sony! Spin!!!

Groups like VGChartz and NPD track units sold, not units shipped. There is a big difference.

Now I will give you that most likely they only shipped about half a million units worldwide, either expecting that they wouldn't sell many initially, or that they would generate free hype by shortstocking the units at retailers intially.

It's not fanboyism, it's capitalism.

The fact is that by the released sales numbers, there were just under 500,000 unique users purchasing the Move hardware. Here's where it gets dicey though, because if you want more than one player to play, you need to buy additional controllers.

Now. Say if a person wants his wife and kid to play a game with him, he needs two more controllers. If the average person buys 2 or three controllers, half a million users because 1.5 million units really quick.

How does this affect developers? Huge.

We'll take a Move only game, Eyepets. Yeah, I know. It's first party. But I'll use it as an example anyway.

As a developer, you count largely on the number of people that actually has the system or platform it runs on. Now while 1.5 million units to Sony can look good, there's no real way for us to tell exactly how many people actually OWN Move.

So I spend all this money to develop a game and push it out to the public. It's an awesome game and gets glam reviews! Half the owners of the Move buy it! And I sell 250k units.

Wait. What? So I just spent all my development money to MAYBE break even?

Razor vs. Blade is skewed with the Move.

In the past, you had a console. Rule of thumb, you sell more software (blades) for the console vs. hardware (razors). That's how you make money. Now with the way Move is bundled (one controller per unit), that's reversed. You'll be selling more Razors than you will Blades. So the product is fundamentally designed to make money for Sony specifically. While the developers don't make as much per unit.

Here's the retarded part. Attach rate.

Going by vgchartz numbers:

Now with the way you have packaged your units, your attach rate is also skewed. Because now, they've sold 600,000 units to 480,000 unique users. Because you're selling more hardware units than you are software, the attach rate will very quickly be less than 1. Which doesn't look attractive to developers at all.

The way that Move has been marketed and packaged and subsequently is being tracked sales-wise, soley benefits Sony and not the third party devs. Which will help it pretty well in the short term, but could very well hurt them in the long.

Dammit! I should have put this on my blog and linked it. :-P

/endlecture

~W75

@justinian

So, what is being discussed here is not so simple (as your previous post was suggesting).

@theredsoldier

I can't. I don't believe Sony can lie about their shipped figures and I have no access to the data VGcharts sold figures are based on.

Your second point about stocks being out, if true, indeed does add to the confusion.

I was just simply explaining the definition of the terms.

@justinian

If things are so simple, please read my previous post and explain me the situation.

Someone's undertracking :-)

I hate to say it, but this site really IS turning into Gamespot. The epic emo meltdowns here are just sad. For years, everyone has said the same thing, for Sony, Nintendo and MS alike, about shipped != sold, and it was accepted. Apparently now if you say that, you're a "hater".

Shipped means "sold by Sony (MS or Nintendo) to Retailers". Money for Sony (MS or Nintendo).

Sold means "sold to customers by retailers". Money for retailers.

Really simple.

Dont have move yet but I gotta say... YEEEEEW!

@Hyruken - no that was a prediction for US first week.

Looking at how some people are saying its sold out in the US and others saying there are plenty, it should be around 700K - 800K.

2.5 million WW at this point is very impressive and this is without Japan who just got the Move yesterday.

pretty good, considering they're not spending 500 M$ to convice people to buy the device.

@kain_kusanagi

So, you think we should rely on VG Chartz numbers. Then, please explain me this situation:
On the one hand:
1 - Sony already shipped 1.5M in Europe.
2 - Consumers are all complaining because of Move stock outs.
3 - The high demand in Germany made Amazon increase the Move's price in 42% and the consumers are still buying it.
4 - Sony plans to increase the production.
On the other hand:
5 - VG Chartz numbers show Move sold 470k not just in Europe but in the whole world.
6 - VG Chartz claim that 600k were sold considering all Move units.
7 - From those 600k, 348k were sold in Europe.
So, 1.5M seems not enough neither for Sony (which wants to increase the production) nor for the consumers (who don't find Move units available to buy). But VG Chartz thinks that only 348k were sold. Can you tell me if there's a chance retailers are hidding 77% of Move shipments (which is more than 1M) from the consumers because they prefer to play with them than to sell them and make money?

So that means there are 700k of these things on shelves if move accounted to 300k sales as reported?

@Pyramid12

Shipped might mean sold to Sony, but to the rest of us it means shipped. And yeah, when MS and Nintendo only give shipped numbers I don't consider them sales either.

Good as!! keep it up

Why are people acting stupid?
Shipped means sold for Sony.
They don't get another cut when a shop sells a product to a customer.
They get their share when they sell it to the shops.

@kain

SO Nintendo and MS are also hiding behind shipped sales because thats how they also report their numbers.

And lol @ shipped doesn't mean they sold, if they shipped it means the retailers bought it from them which means THEY SOLD IT to the retailers == MONEY $$.

GOAL POST KEEPS MOVING AND MOVING, I got a song for this occasion...

dedicated for the haters: "don't cry out loud"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dbf2C39kNs0

Shipped does not equal sales. Sony could ship 20 million if they if they wanted but it wouldn't mean they sold 20 million. If Move had sold well they wouldn't be hiding behind shipped numbers and they'd be bragging about sales.

To know how well Move has sold in the US and WW we will just have to wait for VGchartz to do a report on actual sales.

WOW!!! I'm a huge Sony fan and even I didn't expect to see worldwide numbers above 1.5 million in the first month.

wow, I never expected it to be this big of a hit right away...I thought it'd be slow in the short run, but have legs like GT games in the long run.

LMAO!!!

The haters are now crying in their bedroom and won't come out of their room for dinner!

Broken hearted ROFL!

All I know is my wife had a really hard time finding a Move starter pack across 2 cities. But this is in New Zealand, not USA. When I was travelling through Europe recently all of the duty free electronics retailers were out of Move starter packs (including Sony Style at Heathrow terminal 5), but they probably only ordered small amounts. The mall I went to in Brussels had a pretty big stack of 'em.

We ended up finding a move starter pack (for the nephew), and I bought 2 move controllers (for myself) at HMV Heathrow terminal 3 (no starter packs available though, didn't matter for me because I already have the PSEye). So that's effectively a +2 to Move install base without a single Move game bought (already have Eyetoy, using it to play RUSE and waiting for Heavy Rain Move patch to be released in NZ). So there's definitely a significant difference between Move HW sold and Move specific games sold, esp outside USA where stater pack doesn't come with Sports Champs.

BTW

Good for them I guess... personally I think this is just a tryout for the next generation though. Move came out a little too late on PS3

i can imagine the strong sales. Every bestbuy that i go to, all the moves are sold out except for the bumdle $99 package.

I dunno how you guys say its a flop?
The software right now just isn't there.. A million isnt bad, considering it just released in Japan yesterday. If you think about it, a million shipments of software in a month isn't really something to complain about, neither is this.

@Naraku

According to the quote, it does seems that the sales are doing good. Though they still want more.

@Carl, it's not sales, it's their shipment. There's a difference. I was just at the GameStop near my house when I picked up dinner from Subway (before my class), and the worker there said he hasn't sold a whole lot of them since they launched. Yet, they had to replace several of the Move controllers at the PS3 demo station as people were ripping the glowing orbs off the controllers.

In b4 comments section turns into a shitstorm.

Really good sales though!

Damn it Serious_frusting! I clicked on this news thinking of writing that exact same thing! xD

but but but its teh flopz