I think VGC overtracks the legs of almost all games.

Wowza.


But we've known RE4: Wii Edition has been overtracked for months.

It does so a margin that large could be possible.

RE4 Wii on capcom website is 1.500 as of Dec 31st 2008 (most likely a rounded up number.

last week it did 5.6K and we have it at 1 664K... so I guess about 1 630K for Dec 31st 2008

1500 to 1630 K is pretty close... especially considering that most numbers on the capcom site are well rounded off...
oh and their site says sold not shipped... probably increasing the rounding of numbers.

You are realllly streching things......

Uhm no when you factor in USA + Canada + Mexico + South America you can have margins that are bigger then NPD that covers one area the USA.  Not saying VGC is right on the money but the margin's aren't that bad if you factored in how VGC covers all those areas.

It's sold to retailers, ie shipped. Publishers have no way to track sold numbers to customers (except by hiring companies like NPD to give them estimates because most retailers have no obligation to report sold numbers to the publisher).

Keep that in mind and the number sold to customers are going to be bellow that number, how much bellow is hard to say but probably at least 200k bellow...( 50k retailers worldwide each carrying 4 copies doesn't seem to be an overestimation).

Now it probably is overtracked but there are many mitigating factors.

1. NPD isn't perfect. Their figures are not 100% perfect and they do not release information on changes to past figures.

2. There is a margin of error for all sales tracking. VGC will not get it perfect either.

3. NPD only tracks one market in the region (albeit the major market) therefore VGC being somewhat over should always happen. I think I heard 10% for Canada, 5% for Mexico and 5% for South America at one point?

I think VGC is probably an acceptable 5-15% over for a lot of titles in the first few weeks, but then 50-500% off in a lot of the legs tracking.

Remember that a lot of these games have already had corrections in the past, because Capcom shipment data is more common than for most other companies. So VGC may have already corrected down to Capcom numbers for 50% or 75% of the total sales, and then still subsequently overtracked by 15 or 30% of the total.

This is unavoidable as long as VGC keeps putting numbers out there for gazillions of games every week. If VGC covers 5% of the market, for a title which they estimate sold 5K copies, they only directly tracked 250. When a title is selling that little, maybe most retaillers have dropped it. Maybe a retailler VGC covers is the only one carrying it. Or maybe the retaillers VGC covers are some of the only to have stopped carrying it. You can only undertrack in a given week by the amount of weekly sales though, while if VGC covers 5% of the market and covers all of the sales of a particular game, they could overtrack by 20 times the actual sales in a given week.

Even the biggest sources only put out numbers for the top group of games. Rarely will you see sales for more than the top 40 SKUs in a country in a week, and that's from people with far more market coverage. Meanwhile VGC lists not just the top 200, but hundreds and hundreds beyond. I think VGC has done a poor job of developing their legs tracking because those numbers rarely get attention compared to first week data, and they can always fall back on "percent of total" instead of "percent of total since last correction."

If anyone read my post, you'll see how America's numbers are done here.