And i know it's always said that they virtually make nothing out of it but that's because the margin is far lower compared to software/peripherals.
But the absolute number is higher.
It's about 10% for Gamestop, so that would be $30 for a $300 ps4.
Oh, is it that much? Still, I can see how retail may consider that "zero" margin; I think their margins are usually closer to 100% on the stuff they stock. And as I was saying before, once it comes off the ship, retail is responsible for moving it around the country, storing it, hiring people to sell it, etc. I could see most or all of that $30-$40 being eaten up fairly quickly. Anyway, it's good to know there is some margin there, just for calculation purposes.
Actually, the other day Zhuge and I were talking about the possibility that retail margins on hardware are higher in Europe than they are in the US. The prices in EU/UK seem generally higher than the US prices, even accounting for VAT and exchange rates, and at the same time, it's much more common to see retailer-initiated discounts there, which would tend to indicate they have larger/any margins to work with.
"well" over 25 million means it could be millions higher than 25, he likely just didn't know specifics of anything outside of what Sony ships.
And to be frank, Sony's ship number is likely very close to sold-in. There aren't a ton of PS4's sitting on shelves.
So 29 million shipped is about as good as sold.
Any time now, yes. Going by Sony's earlier sell-in/sell-through reports, backed by general knowledge of how stuff moves around the globe, we can see that Sony's sell-in leads sell-through by about 5-6 weeks, globally. The delay is primarily because it takes nearly a month for a container ship to sail from China to NA or EU, and then it needs to clear customs, be trucked to the distribution centers, be trucked to the local stores, stocked on the shelves, and finally sold.
So that means that the last of the shipments that left the factory on September 30th should be in customers' hands in the next 7-10 days. Of course, consoles going to Asia may sell just a couple of weeks after they ship out.
So while it's hard to say what they're at right this second, we can say with reasonable certainly that they should be at 29.3M sold through no later than November 14th. Well, at least we can say that back on September 30th,
Sony and their retail parters were reasonably certain that would be the sell-through by then, and they're pretty well-practiced at this sort of thing.