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Forums - Sales Discussion - The official January NPD Thread

PooperScooper on 15 February 2008

My major concern with this is Ioi's hypocrisy. He is willing to change numbers consistently because other places cover more data than him in others and Japan, but when a bigger US based company that each of the manufacturers acknowledge differ from Ioi he doesn't change them? A word of advice then DON'T CHANGE THEM AT ALL THEN. This site kinda lost credibility to me now. "Lets change them to agree with these numbers but those guys numbers are way off" How about this "We have a limited amount of coverage but we aren't doing this for an exact science. Just to give the people a general idea of whats going on. If data differs from us oh well"



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Stever89 on 15 February 2008
PooperScooper said:
My major concern with this is Ioi's hypocrisy. He is willing to change numbers consistently because other places cover more data than him in others and Japan, but when a bigger US based company that each of the manufacturers acknowledge differ from Ioi he doesn't change them? A word of advice then DON'T CHANGE THEM AT ALL THEN. This site kinda lost credibility to me now. "Lets change them to agree with these numbers but those guys numbers are way off" How about this "We have a limited amount of coverage but we aren't doing this for an exact science. Just to give the people a general idea of whats going on. If data differs from us oh well"

I don't understand how he is being hypocritical? He changed them at the beginning of Jan when NPD came out because they had different numbers than him for Dec, but then had to change them back once the financials came out. He changes them as he sees fit. Most of the time his numbers are so close to NPD that changing them would hardly do anything at all. This time it's a very big difference, and I'm sure he'll look at his samples and numbers and see what he thinks about them, and then will adjust accordingly. If anything, he really just needs to raise PS3 90k in NA, and lower the DS by 250k. And he may do that. We'll have to see. He's a busy guy, so he'll need time to figure out what he plans to do. Just be patient.



kamil on 15 February 2008

@mike:
1. I think that those 374k was just a type in one of the press releases. Don't think it was the first one and all others have it 274k.
2. That's not a big surprise, lots of simExchange users use vgchartz to predict NPD numbers.
3. So you are atacking NPD becouse it tracks "only" 60% and its number aren't close to vgchartz, right? The problem is that vgchartz in not even close to 60% so if NPD is off becouse of not-full market coverage than vgchartz is way more off.



dolemit3 on 15 February 2008

More software numbers:

[360 Kingdom Under Fire: CoD] = 52K
[NDS Advance Wars: DoR] = 81K
[PS3 Burnout Paradise] = 83K
[PS3 Uncharted] = 54K
[WII No More Heroes] = 65K



Currently playing on PS3: God of War III

Currently playing on Xbox360: Final Fantasy XIII

Currently playing on NDS: Chrono Trigger

PooperScooper on 15 February 2008

@ Steve - then don't change numbers at all. You can't change some numbers because yours doesn't agrees with theirs and not change other numbers on the same basis.



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Jai93485 on 15 February 2008

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=9776971&postcount=1654

No More Heroes sold 65k. Uncharted at 54k. They were both overtracked by a fair margin, Uncharted should probably be closer to 400k right now instead of 460k like VG Chartz has it. Still, it's well into the million mark and should hit 1.5 million at least in its lifetime



mike_intellivision on 15 February 2008

@kamil

I agree with the typo point ... though interesting it was from the same early report, which makes you wonder.

As for the predictions, Patcher's predictions were similarly off and I doubt he uses VGChartz.

Finally, my point was that 60% does not matter if it is NOT representative. Without Wal-Mart and Toys R Us sales, the NPD has a biased sample (which means by-and-large higher sales for Sony and MS and lower for Nintendo).

@Pooper

Ioi said he was going to wait for the financial statements from the companies s and the quarterly reports to make large-scale changes. NPD makes changes too, but only paying customers see them. Also, long-term, the numbers all tend to agree, which means that the estimates correct themselves.

Mike from Morgantown

My point is that everything is estimates and nothing is gospel. So treating



      


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Bodhesatva on 15 February 2008
Jai93485 said:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=9776971&postcount=1654

No More Heroes sold 65k. Uncharted at 54k. They were both overtracked by a fair margin, Uncharted should probably be closer to 400k right now instead of 460k like VG Chartz has it. Still, it's well into the million mark and should hit 1.5 million at least in its lifetime

There are a whole bunch of issues with this month's NPD, so these would be small issues to begin with.

But more importantly, Ioi says that NMH sold approximately 40k during this time frame, so he actually has it undertracked.

http://vgchartz.com/amonthly.php?month=1&year=2008&console=&maker=&boxartz=1 



http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a324/Arkives/Disccopy.jpg%5B/IMG%5D">http://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a324/Arkives/Disccopy.jpg%5B/IMG%5D">

Jin_Kazama on 15 February 2008
ioi said:
Well the only figures from NPD that cause me any concern this month are DS hardware, PS3 hardware and Galaxy. Everything else, as far as I am concerned, agrees well enough to be within margins of data sampling differences. Tackling each one in turn:

DS hardware - from our sample data, DS was consistently selling better than all other hardware across the board. We had some shortages reported, but nowhere near the level that NPD are reporting here and nowhere near the level that Wii seemed to be seeing. So the obvious conclusions are that our stores were not that representitive in that they must have been better stocked than nationally on average, although I feel that NPD may be quite low themselves on DS data. I also think that sometimes they will scale data to account for errors in previous months, maybe we are seeing an element of this. We will speak to Nintendo to get a better feel from them as to how many units they actually managed to ship last month. Interestingly, if you compare NPD LTD figures for DS (and add a generous 10% for Canada) to Nintendo shipments you'll find that even if Nintendo didn't manage to ship any new units in Jan there should still have been enough units floating around from December to sell much more than 250k in Jan.

PS3 figures also defy logic to an extent. Sure people will be buying more PS3s since there is a shortage of 360 premiums but still that is a big jump from the kind of sales we saw in November / Dec (relative - it is obviousy less but not as much less as you'd expect given the modest holiday sales). Again, our data consistently had PS3 at the bottom of the pack, despite 360 shortages and I find it hard to see how we could be 80-90k too low unless some chains were seeing an enormous PS3 boost - all our data had it selling on par or slightly less than this time last year.

Galaxy sales are also a little suprising, from selling similar amounts to COD4 in November / December it sells half in Jan? Traditionally, we'd expect Mario to have larger legs, which of course it will later in the year as COD falls away, but again all of our data had Galaxy comfortably outselling everything else throughout Jan. So again, I'm in no rush to go changing anything and am waiting to see what manufacturers say on the issue.

A general comment about NPDs hardware data this month, all figures fall between 270k and 230k. Given the fact that ~80-90k of this is from Walmart / TRU alone, I'd almost call it a 6-way tie - especially under a situation with huge shortages which affect different stores in different ways. Walmart could quite conceivably have sold 150k DS alone last month, for example, had they been sent units preferrentially. I'm not saying they did, but it is worth bearing this kind of thing in mind. Certainly those making a big issue of PS3 > 360 when the difference is 30k in a month that has proven to be hard to peg down due to stock issues are definitely not showing much of an understanding for this kind of thing...
I think you are misreporting numbers because you're a fanboy even though you could be costing yourself ridiculous sums of cash.  Oh wait.  I'm banned for saying this in a horrible way.

Stever89 on 15 February 2008
dolemit3 said:
More software numbers:
[360 Kingdom Under Fire: CoD] = 52K
[NDS Advance Wars: DoR] = 81K
[PS3 Burnout Paradise] = 83K
[PS3 Uncharted] = 54K
[WII No More Heroes] = 65K

Are those LTD sales? Or just Jans sales? Here are VGChartz numbers:

KUF: COD - 82k
Advance Wars: DoR -  40k
Burnout - 60k
Uncharted - 81k
No More Heroes - 39k

Note: These aren't necessarily for the same 4 week period, thus some may be higher.

I think NMH and Adv. Wars are both undertracked... the others I'm not sure about.