Agree with you albionus

sharky:"Especially with the Elite flying off shelves and selling out just as much as Wii the last few weeks!"

Where and when ?  :D

Edit: Has anyone of you lately been in Gs's forum's... it is more ugly in there. ;)

Your serious Sharky? I mean like stof said there has to be a motive for any conspiracy theory and I really don't see what if anything it is here I mean are you saying the NPD numbers are bias towards Nintendo or ioi because whichever it is the next step would have to be why. It seems to me that if you were going to move the numbers in any way you would need some serious motive like money going somewhere but if this was the case would seem that the numbers should be bias the other way around not towards Nintendo also as someone else said if this was the case MS or Sony would speak up as it doesn't look good for them to be outsold by the competition. Anyways point is if you want to say there is some type of conspiracy at least make it logical I mean here is just the first thing I thought maybe the Wii is selling oddly well right now compared to consoles in the past in their first 6 months of release and thus whatever formula is used is failing to account for the odd number of sales it is recieving during Jan-Apr and maybe these sales are detracting more than expected from system sells of the PS3 and Xbox360.

Oy. Not this again.

ioi was only 10,000 units off on xbox 360 numbers (6% to high) which is practically nothing. No matter how refined ioi makes his methods you can't expect to get any better then this becuase the NPD numbers are estimates themselves. If anything this alone should make you believe that the NPD #s on the 360 are accurate and correct.

Also, this is the first month in awhile (maybe ever) that the wii #s by VG chartz were lower then NPD wii #s. Have you been waiting to post this crack pot theory or do you just want to ignore every other month when wii #s were higher by VG chartz then by NPD?

"Never mind that ioi was surely tweaking them UP to start with, and it still wasn't nearly enough for Wii last month!"

How do you surely know this is what he is doing? I read your post and kept an open mind but it just doesn't make sense.

"Especially with the Elite flying off shelves and selling out just as much as Wii the last few weeks!"

When did the elite come out? Didn't it have only a couple days to sell in the month?

"I'm willing to bet that Wii BARELY OUTSELLS 360 at ALL in the raw data! Period!"

Your delusional if you truly think this. I'm willing to bet that ioi doesn't tweak the numbers that he collects at all. If he did tweak the numbers then he wouldn't be so dead on when it comes to xbox 360, PSP, PS2 (16% over), and DS (15% over on the DS).

Also, you can't just add percents together (you did 20% + 20% = 40%) because the percents are derived from different numbers.

sharky, I only have one question. Why did MS change their shipment forcasts from 13-15 million down to 12 million by mid-year? If you can answer that question, you may realize the 360 isn't selling as well as they had hoped.

Short answer to thread title: No.

Oh, don't do that and use real math on a conspiracy theorist!  

 another one of those, "yeah, well i know 3 people who have 360's and they didnt get 3 re dlights so the problem doesnt exist!!!" Dude, let it go, the 360 sales are bad, th eonly reason they look okay is because of the PS3, just let it go...just because your ebuddies game on the 360 you think its immensely more popular than it is, this is big country, just because you hover around 360 game boards doesnt make it the center of the universe.

The major issue with the assumption that the 360 is selling near the Wii (despite it not): The Wii is $250, the Xbox 360 is $400. Which is going to sell better? The 360 would be selling @ Wii levels, or greater if it was $250 for a premium model, but its not. If NPD was rigging the charts, why was the 360 off by a mere 50k units last month, then a huge chasm this month, minus 1 week of Elite sales? Answer: No one wants to pay $400 for a 360 at the moment (or for that matter, never will again) except for those wanting the bigger HD and wanting to re-purchase an elite. The 360 is my favorite system, and Im always here promoting it (heck, my avatar is a sales chart for J-360 sales, and how it's drastically improved). Despite that, i'm not going to be delusional and think the 360 is the target of a multinational conspiracy by NPD, MC or any other tracking firm. Their job is that the get PAID to get it right.

Something you might want to think about is the fact that Microsoft does its own sales tracking as well. It has access to better numbers then NPD and could easily release sales figures if they were that far off. Similar to how Sony released sold figures when it sounded good during the life of the PS2 and Nintendo has been with the DS and Wii. So far the Nintendo data is very close to the NPD sales. Microsoft continues to only release shipped figures and I believe there is a good reason for it.