You should really try to understand the basic english of this sentence: "My point was that you're skewing your data by comparing units shipped to units sold." you're getting close, but not quite there. Here is a hint: Shaun never said "these units sold are more/less than these units shipped" he was simply taking one shipping number and comparing it to another shipping number.
Listen, the point is I'm not here to discuss who is right and who is wrong in this specific instance, but, you're wrong.
Eli, you don't give a ####. Well done. Doesn't really progress the matter does it? Maybe contribute by either passing comment on the shipped/sold data issue or explain why a certain percentage of your users - commenters- can be openly disregarded. But if you genuinely don't give a ####, why are you here presenting as a toxic element? I thought THAT was the very thing you said was bad about the comments section and yet I come to the threads where everything is supposed to be civil and I'm called a douchebag, toxic, belligerent person and the guy who runs the website doesn't give a #### ! Nice.
We've actually spent the entire day linking to this thread and laughing about it in our Slack chat, so, I'm mostly here for amusement at this point.
I dont openly disregard you, I openly feel sad for you and your inability to understand logic and language on a basic level.
Do I give up with you? I'll try one more time. Go and read another news website. Go on, do that and come back to me. The data Shaun was comparing (one shipping number to another shipping number) wasn't correct. What he did (and I believe it wasn't intentional, it was a mistake) was compare the 49.59 mil PS2 units shipped in December 31st 2000-whenever, to 30.2 mil PS4 units sold in November this year. Shaun stated that both those numbers in his comment are units shipped. That's simply not the case. The ENTIRE INTERNET disagree's with his comment, including Sony. This data isn't hard to find. Like I said, do a simple Google search. You're not close, you're no where near. Maybe if you can grasp the basic English that I've used in my comment, you might start to understand.
I can't tell if I'm reading TouchArcade or stuff pasted from https://www.reddit.com/r/iamverysmart anymore.
Eli, instead of being like this, can you not just pass comment on whether you've checked the info that Shaun published. I've even posted links above for ease of use. You don't have to search for it. I don't know why I have to be labelled 'wrong' when no one here will even justify why they think I'm wrong. The info I've referred to is literally EVERYWHERE else on the Internet.
Wait, I thought you said this wasn't about who was right and who was wrong? This is only further reinforcing the fact that legit everyone who complains that "TA can't handle anyone disagreeing with them" are actually the ones wholly unable to handle any form of disagreement.
It isn't Eli. But you and your crew here seem hung up on that little detail. I figured if we could shed light on it and get past it then we can discuss the issue that I originally wanted to discuss before everyone else derailed the topic by referring to Carter's article. I can handle disagreement. But I don't understand why you, and some of the other guys in this thread can't simply check those facts. I've posted links, referred to the other websites where the data can be checked. Either check, provide your own verification of Shaun's data, or quit discussing that and my comments on that article and discuss whether or not article comments should still exist.
Here you go, this should make it easier. And then maybe we can get past this and discuss whether it is right for commenters who raise valid points to just be dismissed. A quote from Forbes article: "By comparison, the PlayStation 2 shipped 30 million units between its March 2000 launch in Japan and May of 2002, and about 40 million units by September of that year. Its important to note that shipped is not the same as sold through to consumers. The PS4, in other words, is selling even faster than the PS2, which is a remarkable achievement. Its also beating Microsofts Xbox One at retail, and absolutely thrashing the Nintendo Wii U." http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2015/11/26/playstation-4-has-sold-over-30-million-units/ So laugh at me all you want Eli, but when presented with info such as above (and the other three websites referred to), how do you justify your earlier comments and your instant and premature dismissal of my of contributions?
I stand by my belief that you are the absolute worst type of person on the internet, and somehow consistently manage to make me wish I worked in a different field so I never needed to deal with this sort of shit even though I love my job. Let me put it for you this way- The bread and butter of TouchArcade are people who casually come check out the site a couple times a day to find other cool stuff to fiddle with on their phones. Of those people, the hardcore members dig deeper and come hang out in our forums where they can often discover those same games quicker because it takes a lot less effort to make a thread than it does for us to write an article. Forum people are awesome, generally super pleasant, and while people might think some crazy things about free to play games, it's a blast hanging out here. Consequently, I don't consider the whole front page commenter "Let me tell you how wrong you are" personality type to be valuable at all for TouchArcade, quite the opposite in fact. I genuinely don't care how many PS4's are sold. Whether we were right or wrong, I will sleep easy tonight. I trust Shaun's analysis of things because he is without a doubt one of the most knowledgeable people I've ever known when it comes to all things to do with video games. I'm going to side with Shaun over random commenters every single time. These highly abrasive argument tactics you use genuinely just make me want to have nothing to do with you, and really make me wonder what your day to day life is like if this whole internet know it all schtick you've got worked up also pollutes the real world.
iAjent I think the problem is that you don't realize that nobody here cares even a tiny bit about what you're saying. "IS IT UNITS SHIPPED OR UNITS SOLD?????" Nobody cares. Maybe Shaun made a mistake, maybe not. It doesn't matter. Carter's article was an editorial, some water cooler talk based on his opinions about where consoles are heading. Not even everyone at TA agrees with him, Carter and Eli were arguing back and forth about it just yesterday! So when you make multiple comments on the subject in the douchebaggy way that you do (that you apparently don't see yourself) then I'd say Eli was incredibly spot on in calling you pedantic, as that's exactly what you're being. How you interpret that as "being dismissed" I don't' understand, but as I've said already, I don't ��������ing care, so please don't try to explain it to me. It's just that you're trying SO HARD to prove a meaningless point, and you've put your big boy Mr. Serious pants on when in reality none of this shit is serious in any way. There are real problems in the world and how many units the PS4 has sold versus shipped doesn't even appear on the radar. BTW, saying you come off as a douchebag is not the same thing as calling you a douchebag. You might be a very nice person in real life, in fact given your passion about unimportant subjects like video game hardware sales, I'd say you're probably a pretty alright dude. But your internet demeanor falls squarely in the realm of "douchebaggy" so this will probably be a problem for you continuing into the future. Seriously, go back and read your posts and try to recognize the tone, it is very unappealing.
I "published" no info. Do I have to get Eli to check everything I personally tweet? Here's the thing - you're right. I said the 30.2 million was shipped, but it was actually sold-in. And the difference between the two *can* be quite important, as in Q4 2006 when Microsoft stuffed the channels to try to reach 10 million units sold first, an arbitrary benchmark they had made a lot of PR fuss about but were suddenly in danger of losing to Nintendo. Between 2-3 million Xbox 360s were overshipped and left sitting in warehouses/retail. Nintendo ended up beating them to 10 million anyway. We know they stuffed the channels because the next quarter's shipments were super-low. So yep, I used the wrong word and it's a difference that can matter, so it's fine (and in my case welcome) to point that out. But it ended up being the wedge you used to dismiss my overall point, a wedge that only works *if and only if* there was a large (we're talking 5-6x the size of the 360 overstuff) discrepancy between shipped PS2s and sold-in at the close of December 2002. If your contention is that ~30% of the PS2s shipped at that point were sitting unsold somewhere, then there's not much I can do to dispel that with public data. I suppose I could point at the following quarter's shipments, which were healthy as ever and point to PS2 stock in stores at the close of 2002 being in need of refresh, but that's conjecture and I'm not sure you're on board with that. So let's leave it simple: PS2 Dec 31 2002 - 49.59 million shipped. PS4 Nov 22 2015 - 30.2 million sold. Either my point is right and the PS4 is trailing the PS2, or my point is wrong and the PS4 is ahead of the PS2. In case A, it would require that Sony PR misled or confused the issue with weasel words to make the current situation look better than it actually is (which is a big part of their job, remember the "PlayStation Family"?). In case B, either Sony is giving false shipment info in financial statements (illegal), understating their current sold numbers (illogical and possibly illegal if included in official reports), or 30% of the PS2s shipped worldwide by the end of Dec 2002 were sitting unsold in stores or warehouses somewhere but retailers still ordered more the next month for some reason (extremely improbable). Since the crux of my argument is simply that the PS4 is trailing the PS2 (and Wii) and is therefore not the most successful console of all-time and the savior of console sales, the PS2 doesn't even need to be ahead by 15 or 20 million. Even a million or two would prove the point. I believe the console business is in trouble. I believe the future of gaming is going to be elsewhere, probably PC, mobile, and streaming boxes. I'm not happy about that, as I prefer to play on consoles (and am going to have to pay up on a 20 year old wager), but I'm not going to reject the facts just because I don't like them. Now, to the topic. Do you see what I just wrote? That took time. I'm a freelancer, so time is money, and I still haven't scratched together this month's rent. So imagine taking the time to write that knowing most people aren't going to actually read or care about it, given it's demonstrating an uncomfortable truth. Maybe I get a bunch of random people wandering by who want to get mad at me. Maybe it makes readers mad and we end up with a situation like this. Or maybe the whole reply gets eaten by our (necessarily) aggressive auto-spam filter, where I would not be able to retrieve it as I have no special powers any other commenter doesn't have when it comes to comments. So I don't do long comments. Short ones mostly. Answering questions or doing site support mostly. After we had that scuffle months back, iAjent, I tried to stop commenting with anything even remotely inflammatory, which in these politically sensitive times means I can't say much. So I don't. And I probably shouldn't have here, except if I hadn't, we'd have had a bunch of people talking about what a liar, fool, or fanboy I am. Fair cop to the last two, I own a few Amiibos after all, but I'm only human, so the first one bothered me. I web swung in with the solid source of my conclusion, made a goof that didn't change the main point any, and here we are, all literally or figuratively poorer for it. I regret it, and will now only answer questions on my own articles, and only those that pose no threat to offense. That I have to do that there, and not here, tells me which venue is better for discussion, but that's just me. Sorry it all came to this. edit: fastest link to PS2 shipment data I could find on my phone: https://web.archive.org/web/20120609161654/scei.co.jp/corporate/data/bizdataps2_e.html
JEEZ Shaun it's almost as if we'd all have been better off if someone didn't egg you on when you said you didn't want to get involved in that conversation!
Thanks for taking the time to comment Shaun, I appreciate it. If we're going to agree to disagree on certain points then you went about it a heck of a lot better. I also wish it hadn't come to this. I didn't call you a liar (I think the other guy did that), I just wanted to point out the difference in the data. The resultant discrepancy is something we could debate all day. And on that I can very easily agree to disagree, we're all different people after all. What irked me was the way that I was dismissed, despite having a point- that you yourself have at least personally acknowledged. To be told that this kind of behaviour is what makes the comments section toxic, only to then be ridiculed and abused in the forum (where everything is supposed to be nice and fluffy) is disheartening. And that's why I wanted to debate the value of the comments section. Thanks for your time, and sorry for any offence caused.
