ah, Zukaus, you must've just taken a much larger position after I did. I was cash strapped. Should've liquidated other positions for this! Also should've bought Apple stock but what can you do?
@zukaus, yeah we want the response to news to be a bit more realistic. In the real stock market, the price would immediately move in response to the news without any trades having to clear. It would be silly for such data to be public and the price to still be predicting 560,000 copies.
@Alchemy I was not the first. I believe UncleF, Arbiter, Dictionary, and maybe yourself were all in on the trade before myself. Although the action seems strange, I think the marketmakers adjusted to the report rather than us trading it all the way up. The stock jumped from 56 to 96 in seconds.
I never understood why publishers can't find out how many copies they sold when the retailer restocks inventory with them. The retailer (or some distributor along the way) communicates with the publisher on how many copies they need. The publisher should be able to find out how many they have sold through.
ErikAston, that is true the publishers rely on NPD and others to get their data.
However, reading the GameDaily Biz story, it is clearly attributing its 197 million euros revenue due to the "robust performance" of these games. Games only have performance when they sell. You don't say the game is performing well because we've made 950k copies and shipped them out.
The language would appear to imply that research firms like NPD have informed them they have sold 950k worldwide.
Ubisoft has basically no way of tracking sell-through to customers other than by firms like NPD. And the 950K number comes from their financial report, where the number of units retaillers have paid for is the important statistic.
The only thing which appears to be inconsistent is Ubi's langauge, but it would be far from the first time a company has reported "shipped" as "sold."
ralph, as previously mentioned, this type of stuff happens because the data on video games just isn't available or isn't good.
NPD only releases the sales of the top 10 each month. Additionally, that is only US sales and an extrapolation based on actual data of around 60% of the market. Chart Track I believe is only UK sales. I'm sure a ton of this is coming from European sales as well, which we have no professional data tracking. At least, noe that I know of.
Subscribers of NPD data would've had a better picture of this as they would've received the March sales (somewhere below 140k as that was the #10 game).
ErikAston, how do you know the 950K only means sales to retailers? In my experience, press releases will say "shipped" and not "sold" when this is what they are referring to.
Erik, if they meant "sold to retailers," publishers use the word "shipped." The financial statements all say "sold," which means purchased by an end consumer. Publishers also don't actually "sell" the game to the retailer. They ship the units to them with certain agreements like price protection. The financial statements are saying 950k copies of Red Steel have been purchased by end consumers.
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