Embarrassing sales tracking mistake

[Chrizum]

ioi said:
@czecherychestnut - to be honest I've given up trying to convince people. We have a strong following on the site and in the industry so that is what matters.

The issue here is that we're not a large organisation. We don't charge for data and therefore don't bring in much revenue therefore I cannot really afford to take on large teams of people to crunch data and eliminate every single admin error. For what it's worth, NPD data has often contained similar errors where they have games listed for the wrong console or mixed two games up or whatever.

The largest workload in assembling the data each week is matching game names. What I mean by that is one set of data might have "Dragon Age" one might have "Dragon Age: Origins" another "Dragon Age Origins" and so on. Each of these needs to be obviously consolidated into one entry on our database so the different sources of raw data can be added and extrapolated. This can only by done manually (if we want it to be free from error) and so it takes time for someone to go through and match up all these different spellings of names. Sometimes this introduces human errors as well such as the wrong version of a game for the wrong console being matched up.

This is a growing thing - VGChartz is about 50% bigger than it was 12 months ago and continues to grow at the same rate. With preorder data, more elegant databases, more automated tracking techniques and more people helping out then the data is improving but these things do happen, no matter how big, careful or professional you try to be.

Since the data is offered here for free, people should understand that it will be more "rough and ready" and should expect administrative mistakes as well as actual tracking errors from time to time, especially when we are dealing with the volumes of data we are here.

For anybody too ignorant or closed-minded to appreciate that, I think they are already a lost cause and not really worth our time trying to argue with.

I apologize if I came across as rude, as it was not my intention. I only meant to say that errors like these (which I understand may happen from time to time) can be reasons for people to assume this site sometimes guesstimates numbers. I don't mean to say that I think you guesstimate all the sales on this site.

This is the last thing I'm going to say on the matter. Calling me rude is one thing, but at least try listening to people without being an ass about it.