GameStop still has 2.3 million people waiting for next-gen
Sell-through of PS4 already 80% higher than total number of PS3's sold in 2006 fiscal year; Xbox One tracking 15% higher than Xbox 360 launch year
GameStop sold through its entire stock of PlayStation 4 systems as well as an extra allocation from Sony, and it still has 2.3 million people left on its "first to know" mailing list for the system. Executives with the specialty retailer updated investors of the console's early performance in a post-earnings conference call this morning.
Joking that "It's all about the consoles, stupid," GameStop officers rolled through some of the early results from the PS4 launch. CFO Robert Lloyd said the company was pleased with tie ratios on PS4 goods, but declined to go into any specific numbers. As for what sold particularly well, GameStop president Tony Bartel said that PlayStation Plus subscriptions (which included two free downloadable PS4 games--Resogun and Contrast) proved to be particularly popular.
"When you look at all of the PlayStation Plus subscriptions we've sold in our lifetime, and we've been selling them for years, a full one-third of all the subscriptions we've sold in our lifetime were sold in the last seven days," Bartel said.
That sort of digital goods attach rate is becoming big business for GameStop. Elsewhere in the call, the executives confirmed that internationally, customers who picked up Batman: Arkham Origins also bought the game's season pass DLC from GameStop more than 30 percent of the time.
As for the PS4 hardware itself, the company has sold 80 percent more PS4s in one week than the total number of PS3s it sold in its 2006 fiscal year. The Xbox One also appears to be outpacing its predecessor, as GameStop's current number of reserved systems plus its additional allocation from Microsoft already exceeds the number of Xbox 360s sold in its fiscal 2005 by 15 percent.
[UPDATE]: GameStop has since corrected the information it gave out on the call, saying, "GameStop can confirm that the 2.3M number noted during the 11/21/13 earnings call refers to the combined total of customers that have signed up for GameStop's Xbox One and PlayStation 4 First-to-Know Lists."