ioi said:
Personally (and this is just speculation) - from what we saw Target had a much larger marketshare than normal this year. Normally Walmart accounts for about twice as much as Target for Wii but from our estimates sales were much closer at the two retailers - i.e Target (who NPD do track) had a higher than normal marketshare, while Walmart (who NPD estimate for, probably with some bias for Target as it is the closest match in terms of demographics) had a smaller than normal marketshare which would result in overestimating. As Target+Walmart+TRU would account for over 50% of the total Wii market then even a small amount of overestimating could result in a lot of units as we are dealing with such large figures to begin with. Similarly, PS3 had larger shortages at Walmart vs other retailers according to our data so this could reasonably account for differences there as well. Nobody will ever know as NPD's methodology isn't made public, but those would be my opinions. On the other hand, it could just be that our sample data is miles off, but the fact that Nintendo's internal data seems to fit closer to our data leads me to believe our hardware is good, despite the discrepancies. |
Nobody's going to blame you for waiting for Nintendo's numbers, you know.
