New Weekly America Charts - READ THIS THREAD

[Avinash_Tyagi]

ioi said:

Avinash_Tyagi said:

fooflexible said:

I can't believe there is people that actually prefer monthly figures. Weekly is way better, don't you want to know figures more often? Hello? I'm thrilled by this change. Granted there is the concern of accuracy, I'm sure like most people on this site I don't own the company selling these games, so exact figures are not nessecary to anything I do, ballpark figures are just fine. For example in Japan the number for last week was around 60,000 for the Wii. If it was anywhere between 50-70,000 I would have been content, refering to its accuracy. Anywhere in that range gives me about the same impression of the system sales there, and that's alot of leeway. I'm sure the percentages that these sales are off by are smaller. Now I know these numbers add up and can change a picture drastically if a consistent mistake is made in the same direction for a long duration. But I'm sure the numbers will be corrected as they have time to analyze more data from more sources over time. So really folks whats the big deal?

 My only problem is there is no option to search for a particular titles' sales in America, as there is in Japan's data. it's fustrating to look up the release month and then track every months of it's sales to get a total, I'd much rather have a search option. And I hope there is soon more then 50 titles addressed for American sales, Japan has like what...200? So it would be nice to at least get 100. And I'd love to get any chart at all for Europe. Alright I'll stop now, I love the site and consider this a positive development in the long run.

 Well as long as VGchartz is within 3-5% accuracy for its data then I would consider it authoritative

You're being pretty unrealistic there. I'd say that NPD figures aren't even that accurate. I think being within 10% of the actual amount is pretty good really. It is not uncommon to see something like a game selling 41k according to Media Create and 28k according to Famitsu - this level of discrepancy occurs between two large tracking services who each charge around $5000-$10000 per year for their services and poll around 40-50% of retailers in Japan. I think a long term goal of being within 10% is realistic, and short term I'd say we probably are only within around 20-25%. So if we have a figure of 85k it could really be anything from 65k - 105k. But then even if NPD report 85k it could be anywhere from say 75k to 95k in reality.

I think a lot of people are naive about the accuracy of all these industry figures. Chart Track who cover over 80% of the UK market (best coverage of any country) had PS3 sales first week at 165k while Sony claimed over 170k. So even there we have a few % difference - we don't know exactly what figures sony track but it is likely to be a very high coverage as well.

At the risk of repeating myself, if you want and expect to see worldwide figures that are 95%+ accurate you can expect to pay something like $250,000+ per year to do so - so you'd better be a large company who needs figures to that accuracy. I can't honestly see why anyone not a professional in the industry would want this and if you're happy with 85%-90% accuracy figures (actually likely to be better over time when publisher figures are taken into account and so on) then you are in the right place and we are trying to give you that for nothing. I think it is unrealistic to expect any more than this and I just want to make that clear to everyone now before we get posts saying "NPD said Wii sales were 418,921 and you said 438,123" and so on - to me that would be an amazing correlation and a lot better than I imagine we will actually see. When you take into account the fact that NPD figures also contain a level of estimation and say Nintendo claim to have shipped 431,000 Wiis in March or whatever then I think it would be a great correlation all round. Don't expect correlation to the nearest unit, or even nearest thousand or tens of thousands (for larger figures) and please be patient as we develop our system, coverage and scaling processes.

So please just bear all this in mind.

 You make a good point, and we will be able to see just how close it is in a few hours to the "official" NPD data