how do they do it, what source do they use for all this.

Does anyone know?

You have an account since november 2007, but you still do not have a clue..?

Check the bottom of the first page.

"VG Chartz estimated sell-through figures are arrived at by tracking sample data from an ever-expanding panel of retail partners and benchmarking the sample data against known reference points (manufacturer shipment figures for example)."

Unspecified retail sources throughout the USA, EU, and Japan. 

All I can say.

because im in a huge argument in another website forum because this guy is saying you, VGchartz, literally makes up all your numbers with complete guesswork.

I always took these figures as ballpark estimates but if this is truly guesswork instead of useful information thats really lame.


Like he was saying how do you guys get the sales in obscure areas like Norway. Also he said that NeoGaf banned anyone using this information.

So please give me more info or I could even link the thread because this guy is a tool.

Astrology and tea leaves

No sales figures are completely correct, each company uses estimations based off of past data and data straight from manufacturers. Even the mighty NPD doesn't get data from Wal Mart or Toys R Us and thus has to estimate the data for those sales.

And VGC does that as well, but VGC just doesn't have as much data incoming as VGC does. However, VGC puts far more weight into financial releases than other tracking companies to validate the numbers.

TO give another example: Media Create and Famitsu provide weekly sales for Japan. They do not have indentical numbers, but both are right. They get data from their respective retailers and extrapolate that to get the sales for all of Japan.

Oh noes, someone on the internets is wrong :P

VGChartz is a very accurate site, and Brett has every reason to be proud.

As others have said, VGChartz receives sales data from retailers, and extrapolates on this to determine the final value. Brett has not told us how large his sample size is, but we have been told that it is not as large as the sample size for NPD data, but that it has increased recently (ever since the data started coming in a couple of days later in the week)

This is the exact same methodology as NPD by the way.

Brett will constantly monitor various other sources looking for games/consoles that have been overtracked or undertracked. Such sources include the numbers of other sales trackers - NPD, MC, Famitsu, the Aussie one, the British one etc as well as manufacturer's shipment reports. This means that even if a single weeks figures are out by 10% (or more in some extreme cases), the total will almost always be within 5% after the game/console has been out for a while.

The sales for obscure areas are harder to get, yes. I believe Norway is one of the countries that actually does get tracked, but obviously, Brett does not get retail info from all 260 or so countries in the world, in those case, I am under the impression that the methodology is to assume the games and consoles have the same attach rates as in a similar country that is tracked. As an example, you could probably not track New Zealand, and just assume that its sales of everything are 20% of Australia's sales (excepting LOTR games, which could be higher) Anyone who actually knows, want to confirm on deny that last bit??

The magic 8 ball tells them but they have to do a whole lot of shaking though.

Part of the reason sites like NeoGaf ban Vgchartz numbers is because they aren't set in stone, Bret reserves the right to change figures after the fact based on information from stores that report less frequently, official company figures etc. This of course causes huge fanboy issues on a number of sites when a game is annouced to have sold 1 million first week but later the estimate gets scaled back to 900K. While the error on this type of change is only 10% it tends to create flamewars and a mistrust of Vgchartz for people who take estimates too seriously.

As far as numbers from obscure counties, obbscure countries tend to buy very few games compared to larger counties and so even if a source of data cannot be obtained they can be accounted for in estimations based off the purchasing habbits of other countries.