I feel I should point something out.

By the reasoning put forward by Carl, the 3DS is also significantly undertracked. Worldwide sales on VGChartz to the end of September 2012 has it at 20.65 million, whereas Nintendo claims to have shipped 22.19 million by end of September 2012.

There seems to be a latent assumption that shipped numbers must be just ahead of sales numbers. I don't see why this needs to be the case. Obviously, they can't sell more than they shipped, but the fact that a shipment was made doesn't mean that it sold.

An example of this could be, for instance, GameStop ordering a large shipment, anticipating big Christmas sales... but getting very little interest. Should this happen, they would then ship all of the excess stock to a storage location. I'm not saying that this is the cause for the difference in numbers for the PS2, but it's not outside of the realm of possibility.

So don't just assume that VGChartz must be wrong.

you would have to have been crazy or just a Ninty zealot to have believed DS passed PS2 anyway.

Or ignorant of the facts. There's no need for this oni.

fair enough, but if you've been a member of the site for even a little while, one shouldnt be ignorant

The 3DS may be undertracked or it could have been in anticipation for the holidays.  You'll have to wait for this quarter's results to find that out.  As for the PS2, the only reason the anticipation for the holidays doesn't work is because of its age and isn't in great demand in the larger regions, so by this time stores can pretty accurately calculate how much stock they will need throughout the year.  And if there was an incredible amount of overstock, then Sony wouldn't be getting requests for more PS2 shipments.

Vgchartz really should fix this, nobody in there right mind would think the ds passed the PS2

You'd be surprised that I just understood why the PS2 was undertracked and how vgchartz collects data. I never realized vgchartz numbers were purely denoting retail sales. This may shock you but I personally had no idea. And it's not like I don't put in the effort, I just never understood.

Some peopl here just don't know how the numbers are generated here, and it's not gross to say that there is little transparency in the numbers to boot.

it will happen tho, the DS sold 178k units on the last week tracked here (week ending Dec 08th) Of course this is Christmas time and that isn't a regular week but still you take an average week in October and you get around 40k sold that would make a million units per 25week period. It's going to cause grief whenever more articles like this pop up but vgchartz just has it first since they indeed haven't added anything to sales in the past year.

I'm not for a moment saying that the numbers here are perfect, please do not get me wrong on that, I'm just saying that tracking of the playstation 2 can't be expected to be done accurately anymore it is a 12 year old system, look at it like this ATgames still produce megadrive consoles which use system on a chip emulation but they're still mega drives VGchartz doesn't track those and add their weekly sales on here but still that's fine because it is 1 close to impossible to track these things accurately and 2 not realistically significant data to track.

Just keep in mind that if you live by vgchartz numbers you die by them too, one week it might be a game you like selling well here and then next it could be a system you're not a fan of doing well, it's all estimations. To say that ps2 should have more tracked here is right, it has 1 year of sales not clocked up, but what is to say that the DS sales are 100% exact also? could be more, could be less.

I am shocked. i thought you knew. Well then i apologize. But there are def. some people out their that would take this "news" and run with it, without even batting an eye.

That I can agree with you on, some would do it out of ignorance, others out of denial. Hard to tell.

tbh it took me forever to get the vgchartz tracking thing, I'm glad I finally figured it out.