Shortly after GameStop released their financial results for the third quarter, they held a conference call to discuss a myriad of topics.
One of them had to do with the PS4, as President Tony Bartel explained:
In addition to selling through all of our reservations, and some additional allocation that we’ve received from Sony, we still have over 2.3 million customers on the First to Know list, which indicates continued demand for months to come.
Also, a survey of our Power-Up Reward members shows that 2/3 of those surveyed expect to own a PS4 or Xbox One in the next 12 months. According to our Power-Up Rewards customers, the #1 concern around the console launch is affordability.
While they wouldn’t release specific PS4 numbers due to competitive reasons, Tony later added:
Our share was higher than on any previous console launch, and our sell-through since launch was 80% higher than the total amount of PS3’s that we sold in our 2006 fiscal year.
Also, with Sony announcing that they expect to sell 3 million PS4s in North America by the end of 2013 (they’re well on the way), Raines says they “expect to sell a large portion of that.”
Raines then went on to talk about how, while other retailers expect “significant price discounting” this holiday, he believes it will affect them minimally on next-gen consoles. One of the reasons why is follows:
We believe that demand for the new consoles will outstrip supply for the months to come. So we do not expect price discounting on the new platforms.
A couple other points were made during the call by executives:
- GameStop sold 52% of all PS3 and Xbox 360 software during the third quarter.
- During the third quarter, their software attach rate was 2.2 times greater than the competition.
Did you buy your PS4 from GameStop? Let us know in the comments below.
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