Completely disagree. NPD is a measuring stick that gets used by retailers and publishers when making decisions about shelf space or creating games. People in the biz want assurance and NPD offers a certain amount of objective assurance.
Objective assurance in the United States, not worldwide. And even bearing that in mind, the NPD is not going to influence how many PS4 consoles retailers are ordering from Sony in any way for the immediate future. When supply catches up to demand, it's a different story, but when supply is plenty for both consoles, the NPD numbers are going to look significantly different than at launch.
If every single PS4 that gets ordered by retailers in the states gets sold, those retailers will continue to order as many PS4 consoles as Sony will allow them to. The fact that Sony is selling in almost twice as many countries at the present moment, means they are by necessity reducing the amount allocated to the US.
That does not in any way mean that retailers are gonna look at NPD and say "whelp, looks like the PS4 isn't selling as well as the XB1, guess we better order more XB1 and fewer PS4s!". It's absurd to think that.
As for creating games, as long as both MS and Sony are still shipping consoles out at a steady rate and adoption continues tracking like it is estimated to, 3rd party people in the 'biz' will continue to develope for both consoles if they are financially able to, and 1st party/exclusives will do no different than they have been. Indy devs on tighter budgets might restrict themselves to one or the other, but considering both are allowing self publishing now and both are based on very simiilar architecture, and the nature of *most* Indy games means they won't be pushing the envelope of the hardware performance-wise, there's no reason to think that Indy developers won't be releasing on both systems in order to reach as wide a potential customer base as possible.
The answer to this question, that no one is patient enough to wait for, is we have to wait for February 12th, when we recieve January NPD numbers, in order to get a realistic look at demand for both consoles. Supply issues for either Sony or MS are only temporary, and has never really cost a console an entire generation. In fact, two of the most severe cases of supply constraint (Wii, PS2) are two of the best selling home consoles of all time.
February is just so far away =/
Once again, the 'realistic look' is only going to apply to the United States, and it's not even going to BE a 'realistic look' at demand in the states, at least not for PS4 for sure, because purchases are still being restrained by supply. It probably isn't even a realistic look at XB1 demand either.
When units of both consoles are sitting on shelves for more than a week, and there's plenty of consoles to meet all demand, none are selling on ebay/CL for more than retail, and consumers can simply walk into their store of preference and buy whichever one they prefer, then we can start looking at NPD as a measuring stick of where the demand is at (in the United States).
NPD numbers are interesting, and I'm watching them to for the console-window shakedown, but I'm also not blind enough to think that NPD is the be all or end all of anything when we're this close to launch and supply still hasn't caught up to demand.
