Accuracy of total sales?

[superchunk]

Hope the following points help clear it up for you.

1. ALL manufacturers, publishers, etc track sales TO RETAILERS.
2. This site tracks sales TO CONSUMERS.

That means a publishers shipped figure will always be different than the counts on this site unless its a really old game/console that has theoretically fully sold through retail.

3. Hardware figures on this site are about as perfect as you could expect without literally being able to count each and every sale from every single retailer throughout the world.
4. Software sales for the top 50 games are probably within the 15% accuracy levels.
5. Software sales for the rest are probably within the 40% accuracy levels.

This means that hardware numbers can be taken as is, however, software (especially grand totals as you are doing) should be considered within a range of proximity to truth for games outside of the top 50 or so.

So your 47m to 69m is actually not that bad. For one, 69m was shipped to retailers of ALL games. I would guarantee that there are ~10m sitting worldwide on store shelves and inventories. Then you're only looking at 5-7m (~10%) off for all titles sold in 2008. meh, not a big deal. Sales tracking is not a perfect science. Its always an estimation.

Btw, you know you can also get the financial reports for each of these companies, which will always have the 100% perfect shipped figures.