ioi said:
Whether the numbers are reliable or not and whether you are rooting for a game to do well are two totally different issues.
The preorder charts are taken from 3 major retailers so they are a reliable representation of what people are putting their money down for from a certain portion of the market, but this is obviously scaled to represent the whole market and in a similar way to the weekly software sales it is the way in which we scale the sample data to represent the whole market that is based on certain assumptions and models which are not always 100% accurate. The way people pre-order games at Target for example, is not a perfect representation of how they will pre-order at Toys R Us or Gamestop. Each store has it's own characteristics and consumer demographics as well as specific deals, but we do our best to estimate the market as accurately as possible from the sample data we have.
So they are reliable if you understand where they come from and appreciate that they are a ballpark figure, accurate to +-10% rather than an exact measure. You also need to take into account that pre-orders are a dynamic thing, the closer you get to release the more pre-orders will increase. Figures for Mario Galaxy 2, for example, are pretty meaningless at this point, whereas for Battlefield, MAG, Mass Effect 2, Bioshock etc you should be able to estimate week 1 in the Americas fairly accurately from the current preorder situation. Take currently weekly preorders, multiply by number of weeks left, add to the current preorder total and you should have a lower bound for final preorders. Add 40% to this to get a lower bound for week 1 sales. Again, this doesn't take into account the fact that the pre-order rate may increase or decrease closer to launch, but should get you in the right ballpark.
Finally, pre-orders are only going to have an impact on week one sales. For 70% of games that open large and drop away quickly then you could actually model total sales fairly well using the week 1 sales estimated above (if you look at most games and do a week 1 / total ratio you'll find many games fit into a pretty small range). For games that sell well over long periods of time, week 1 sales are obviously far less important and therefore pre-orders are a poor indication of how the game will perform in the long-term. This is why very few Wii or DS titles feature in the charts, and the ones that do are the more "core" titles that will see the majority of sales in week one. Wii Sports Resort and Wii Fit Plus didn't chart until just before launch and even then their total pre-orders were very small compared to current sales. So you need to understand how different games perform to gain anything useful from the pre-order charts, not just take it at face value and compare everything like-for-like.
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