Michael Pachter, well known analyst of Wedbush Securities, poked a hive last week when he called into question the claim that the reports of Xbox One X’s record breaking pre-orders are probably meaningless without context, and far from the extrapolations people are drawing from them. Today, speaking on Twitter, he followed up on his controversial remarks from yesterday.
Speaking on Twitter, Pachter clarified that while he doesn’t want the Xbox one X to fail, he needs to be realistic- and at $500, it’s not going to set the world on fire. That said, he foresees 1 million units sold worldwide through the Holiday season, which is not necessarily the best performance a system can put forth in its launch period that also coincides with the Holiday.
Pachter also explained his math a bit, for the US and the UK- for the US, he noted that Amazon comprises about 10% of the US video games market, and never gets allocations as big as physical retailers, so their stock was at most 10,000-15,000 units. For the UK as a whole, he pointed out that if he assumes an average of 2-3 consoles per 150,000 locations in the UK that sell video games (noting that some locations may have gone as high as 10, while others may not have had any allocations at all), the total number still comes to only 150,000.
Whether or not you agree with his math, I think the larger point here is clear- this is just early success, and it is not indicative of the long term health or viability of the Xbox One X. This early success also is not contextualized, thanks to the total lack of numbers- and until Microsoft starts sharing those again, we will always be left to guess.