bcn-ron said:
So what's your opinion on why sales became more than twice as normal in 2008 as they were in 2007?
Look at it this way. As I said above, on a given week, some reasonably predictable portion of the outstanding demand "comes due" as people decide to pick this particular week to buy; when there are no incentives (sales, new colors) or disincentives (new model coming soon) this tends to produce a very even distribution overall of weekly sales, largely shaped by overall retail trends.
When the DS' disruptive software suite (Brain Training, etc.) hit, it produced a spike of new, unprecedented demand: there were probably something like 8 million people who decided
all of a sudden that they needed a DS and needed it right away -- and this is in addition to an uptick in demand from the regular crowd of people who only want a DS at "some point" in the next 0-60 weeks.
So all of a sudden, instead of a weekly demand of 50k people drawing down a potential supply of like 70k, there's a constantly refreshed weekly demand of 100k people
and a
pent-up demand of 8 million people who all want to have the system the instant that it hits the shelves, all drawing down that same 70k weekly supply.
As long as the weekly production is lower than the new weekly demand, that pent-up demand just gets
bigger. Even once the production outstrips it, it's still like paying off a loan -- covering the interest (new weekly demand) plus paying off a portion of the principal (pent-up demand) each week. As long as this is happening, it's
basically impossible to figure out the actual weekly demand from sales numbers because whatever extra production you throw out there is just getting snapped up by irritated people who
really wanted a DS six months or a year ago but will take it now, thank you very much.
In reality, we saw the DS remain in a constant state of sellout for about two years, and at the end of that time its sales decreased because the pent-up demand was met -- now what we were
finally seeing for the first time was the actual weekly demand for the system, which it turns out was a ways above the PS2 on average but way below what it had actually been selling weekly.
It's possible that the rate at which the DS is selling now is measurably and distinctly lower than its height
and continuing to fall, but even so, the amount of future demand still unmet suggested by its current sales figures is still going to make up something like 30% of its end-of-lifetime sales-to-date.