| Dodece said: I would still argue for a conservative estimate. The point is that gamer cards become less reliable over time not more so. People sell old games, buy used games, and lend others their copy of a game. A single copy of a game can end up on a dozen gamer cards. In the absence of hard sales data you have to be conservative. You need to set a firm baseline and stick close to it for any title that has been out for over a certain period of time. Your estimate for Blue Dragon shows the flaw in your system. How can anyone take that figure seriously. I cannot take it seriously and I really loved the game. I think the title should have those kind of sales, but I am a realist. I have no expectation that the title has sold over a hundred thousand copies in the other region. I think you should run a standard candle type of test with your system. Use a very old game for the market with known sales. Perhaps you will have to use a resource outside of this site, and see what kind of deviation you are looking at. I can about guarantee the older the title is the farther you will be off. That is not to say this wouldn't be a good method for tracking new releases this site has missed. However I think my multiple is a conservative safe estimate you really should consider for the older titles. Over time the figures are going to get more wrong then right. I would wager if you run Blue Dragon in a few months your upward estimate will be much higher even though it is far from likely that the title is even to be found new in those regions. |
And I took those into consideration when providing the results. The low estimate is a 3x multiplier. Blue Dragon isn't even a year old in the Others regions. I have tracked retail sales vs. MGC for OVER a year now, and no game comes close to being < 3x by 1 year into it's lifetime. 3.5 is about the lowest I've seen for any given title a year into it's life. I agree that used copies, and rentals can inflate numbers, which is why I gave a range, with the lower end (about 180,000 copies).
And for the record: VGC reports 50,000 copies of Blue Dragon being sold through in North America this year. Quite a hardy number of games being sold, no? Why is it that a game like BD couldn't of sold more than the VGC-reported 60,000 copies LTD in others, especially with how it debuted in Spain?
Lost Odyssey is a good comparible, in this case, I believe. Lost Odyssey has seen 100% more sales in North America according to VGC, and should of tracked similarly in Europe, if not a little bit behind (as Europe does prefer more DQ-esque RPGs than the US does)....Yet VGC shows that Lost Odyssey sales in Others is over 350% higher than Blue Dragon! That is a very large discrepancy...One that we should question before just assuming that the VGC-quoted number of 60,000 units sold in Europe in a year is indeed accurate.
Back from the dead, I'm afraid.
