kamil said:
When he's saying about Sunday happening in either November or December he is making things up. He has no reason to think that. Hypotesis may be either made up completly or may be supported by evidence. I would prefer to end continue this topic.
My claim is supproted by MS spin. As I agree that there still is a room for debate it's not made up.
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kamil, as a business analyst for a video game company (I work for one, FYI), here's the problem I have with the debate, and why I'm having a problem with you saying I am 'making things up':
When you produce weekly or monthly reports, and aggregate the numbers for a given timeframe, you usually go by a very specific day to end your reporting on - either Saturday, or Sunday. The reason for this is that GfK, Chart Track, and NPD are all requesting data, by their affilates (the retailers) to be aggregated on a given day each week, rather than from November 1st through November 30th, they are asking from a specific Monday through a specific Sunday (or Sun-Sat tracking). The reason for this is that said services don't have aggregators in place within the affilates Point of Sales systems to check the data using simple monthly numbers.
Because of this knowledge, here are the facts:
- There were 4 Sundays in November 2007: 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th
- There were 4 Saturdays in November 2007: 3rd, 11th, 18th, and 25th
- There were 5 Sundays in November 2008: 2nd, 9th, 16th, 23rd, and 30th
- There were 5 Saturdays in November 2008: 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th
Why is this so critical to the questioning of the data sets? Because (again) I work as a data analyst for a video game company. I aggregate our reports based on a Mon-Sun cycle, and had 5 reports for the said month. So if we didn't have the ability to track everything on a MTD basis (we do, but again, NPD, GfK nor Chart Track do not), we would be, most likely, going on a 5-week report for sales in November. NPD doesn't do it that way (as stated, they do a 4-4-5 which would mean their sets may be 4 weeks this year).
Problem is with that idea, in this case, it would leave certain days out with a 4-week data set. Because of the fact there would be missing days under a 4-week data set, I would think there's enough reason to question the 124% YoY increase vs. what VGC is showing. Could you indeed be right, and they use a 4 week set, and the actuals show that the X360 only increased 124% from last year (and even this assumes that VGC had the right figures for last year - for all we know, VGC could have undertracked the X360 last year, and been on the money this year)? Sure, but I think there's enough reason to say 'hey, rather than rave like lunatics over 2 PR firms fighting over scraps, lets wait till we see actual values for the month, and not random percentages'. Because again - we don't have solid values for this year, nor last year in November, do we?
