mrstickball said:
And again, the issue is that the ways you can track DD sales is very difficult.
You have to have a reliable system that is built-in by the manufacturer that can some way, allow you to see, on a high level, how many people have played game X in some way or fashion.
Again, for XBLA, I use gamercards that show actual # of purchasing users (via my own methods), then extrapolate to what the market should be at.
For WiiWare/VC, the amount of time that's spent on various game(s), and that is calculated into sales figures.
May I ask you: How do YOU expect VGC to track DD sales? You can pine on about how they need to, but what systems are in place that it can be tracked? My XBLA charts have literally revolutionized the tracking of XBLA titles, and my methods, and results are a YEAR ahead of the biggest tracking firm in America - NPD, or any other tracking firm. Yet despite my genius with XBLA, I can tell you rather quickly: There isn't an easy way to do it for PSN, and I'm surprised that DKII even has a method for VC/WW.
Even then, the only way to track PSN data will be through PSN trophies, and home *if* there's a way to obtain high level, aggregate data using websites and building crawlers vs. any other method, because leaderboards do not always work. That's a big if for PSN data, and even then, it'll take a while to get a comprehensive list for such data.
And the final way you can do it is simply build a huge consumer sampling base, and poll them each month to find out what new products they've bought. This is the ONLY way NPD is doing the data, and their sample size is so abysmally low (somewhere in the low 10,000's) that they won't be very reliable.
Remember: You can argue that VGC should track DD sales, but no one else is doing it. VGC is the FIRST website EVER to have any sort of comprehensive list for ANY DD market...And that was thanks to my methodology, and work I put in...
Mind you, I'm not trying to go on and on about my virtues - the point is that I'm some random VGC schmoe that developed the holy grail of DD information gathering, by finding Microsoft's back door into exploiting their gamercards. That little slice of data has got me a job in the video games industry, more and more job offers, and multiple Emails and interviews with Microsoft going as high as trying to get me to become the next XBLA general manager ---- All over some simple DD charts I made! Why is all of that info important? It shows how difficult DD sales are to come by, and how difficult it is to find any information on sales. |
