| c0rd said: Yeah, this is a biased sample. Two main things: This site is focused on videogame sales. It seems like, since the Wii is dominating, more Nintendo fans gather here. When your console is winning, I suppose it's easier to look at the numbers... This is a videogame website. The type of people that frequent gaming forums, are also the type that buy the niche games like JRPG's, critically acclaimed flops/unpopular games (Okami, NMH, Zack & Wiki). Look at the game collections, for example - 500 users claim to own NMH, a game that sold 390k. Mario Kart Wii is owned by 807 users here, when there are 14.5m copies sold. In short, we don't represent the average core gamer. So, I'd say you can't really draw those kinds of conclusions from such a poll. Not that it was useless, it is interesting... |
We don't represent the average core gamer but perhaps, the fact that more Nintendo fans come here because Nintendo is ahead in the console race approximates the casual gamer count of people who would never come to a site like this in the first place. The other sites are riddled with HD owners because much of the hardcore gamers own HD consoles and the people to frequent video game sites are the hardcore. So actually other sites would be far more biased than this one. Don't you still find it interesting how closely the poll numbers resemble the worldwide sales distribution? I would say that the fact that this site is sales driven and attracts people focused on sales somehow simulates the actual sales environment. Perhaps because most core gamers don't care about sales, they only want to play the games, and most casuals also don't care about sales or frequent gaming sites, so it seems that there might be a better chance for unbias here than you suspect. To say there is or is not bias in this case would simply be assumption unless other aspects were further researched however.
