Estimate: Over 500,000 PlayBooks Sold to Date

Posted
by
Kyle McInnes
on September 21, 2011, at 1:34 PM
in News
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Comments: 7 responses
7 Comments

There is a lot of talk about how the PlayBook is doing in the market, especially given the rumor that production has been slowed. The thought is that slowed production means there is a backlog of unsold inventory. Measuring the number of PlayBooks sold through the download numbers of a free and popular app seems like an accurate way of predicting real sales and that’s just what Eric at Ebscer has done. More after the jump.

pixelated

Pixelated is probably one of the most highly-downloaded free games on the PlayBook. It’s a simple and fun puzzle game where you touch the pixels and change colors, with the goal of making the whole screen the same color. It’s mass appeal and free price point makes it so highly downloaded and therefore a great benchmark for analyzing PlayBook sales.

According to Eric at Ebscer, he estimates, conservatively, that there are 504,000 PlayBooks sold to date. This is interesting news because RIM recently announced they had shipped 700,000 PlayBooks. Since conservative estimates put the difference at around 200,000, there probably isn’t that much unsold inventory. Also, while 500,000 isn’t necessarily amazing, it’s still a decent start to a brand-new product line for RIM.

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  • Beany2510

    i love my playbook. bold9700 and curve9300(work). i dont own any apple product not even an ipod…….and im sick of hearing negative press about anything that isnt apple. especially blackberry (rim) products. 

  • http://about.me/kylemcinnes Kyle McInnes

    Just read this on CrackBerry from Kevin Michaluk: 

    “I’ve said on several occassions now that I peg the active BlackBerry PlayBook user base to be somewhere at or around the 200,000 mark (based on CrackBerry intuition from all the metrics I’m privy to running a site like this). ”

    I wouldn’t be surprised if Pixelated had more than 200,000 downloads. That’s probably an incredibly low estimate.

  • http://about.me/kylemcinnes Kyle McInnes

    Just read this on CrackBerry from Kevin Michaluk: 

    “I’ve said on several occassions now that I peg the active BlackBerry PlayBook user base to be somewhere at or around the 200,000 mark (based on CrackBerry intuition from all the metrics I’m privy to running a site like this). ”

    I wouldn’t be surprised if Pixelated had more than 200,000 downloads. That’s probably an incredibly low estimate.

  • http://twitter.com/_seeley_ Christopher Seeley

    yeah cause the iPad wasn’t a new product for Apple or anything….  look how many of them have been sold…

  • Anonymous

    I don’t really see the value of this comment. Microsoft expects to ship 350 million copies of windows 8 next year. So what are we to do then? By your logic we declare the iPad and hell all Apple computer products monumental failures because they don’t ship anywhere near that number, and let’s face it, never will.

  • http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/vendor/1111 Eric at Ebscer

    Maybe Pixelated isn’t doing quite as well as you think, but I don’t understand Kevin’s number. No matter what assumptions you make, or how pessimistic you are there is no way to avoid the fact that there has been at least a the very least, the last three months have resulted in a 70% increase in the total number of PlayBooks sold. Which implies that if you thought that there were 200k sold three months ago, you have to hold that there are at least 350k sold as of today.

  • http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/vendor/1111 Eric at Ebscer

    Maybe Pixelated isn’t doing quite as well as you think, but I don’t understand Kevin’s number. No matter what assumptions you make, or how pessimistic you are there is no way to avoid the fact that there has been at least a the very least, the last three months have resulted in a 70% increase in the total number of PlayBooks sold. Which implies that if you thought that there were 200k sold three months ago, you have to hold that there are at least 350k sold as of today.