Fab_GS on 31 January 2010
| ioi said: I believe there was an explanation on the first page, seems some people can't read. For some futher insight. For the "Others" region we get direct data for the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia. That's it. For the likes of Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Austalia, Belgium, Netherlands we do not get direct weekly sell-through data and many of those regions don't even have an official tracking body (such as GFK). So most people don't know a huge amount about these regions. What we do is model the sales in the regions we don't get data for via the regions we do. So if PS3 slim causes a 300% increase in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy then we assume it sees the same across the rest of Europe. If 7.5% of PS3 sales in 2009 were from Scandinavia and 6.8% in 2008 and 7.1% in 2007 then we model at 7.13% for 2010. We don't have the raw data to directly estimate sales in every region, some have to be modelled based on the data we do have. Nobody is tracking data in South Africa but its 0.1% marketshare gets lumped in with all of the other regions in "other others". The emerging markets are almost impossible to track, as are the smaller regions in Europe. Luckily they only represent small percentages of overall sales - UK+France+Germany+Spain+Italy covers a good 75% of total European sales so it is more than reasonable in to use this data to cover the remaining 25%. When data gets released into the public like Nintendo's "pan-European estimated based on local tracking services" then they are using the data from ChartTrack, GFK etc in as many regions as they can get, plus doing what we do essentially and extrapolating for markets not covered directly. Since their estimates for Scandinavian and Benelux / Austria / Switzerland were looking around 15-20% lower across the board than VGChartz estimates, and given 3rd party research like can be found here - http://vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=99254&page=1 - then we made adjustments to our estimates and models for these regions, across the board. The same may be true for "other others" when some good quality 3rd party data gets released for Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Russia, India etc. Currently, just like for Scandianvia and Other Europe, weekly sales for those regions are extrapolations of the data we do get, using info from Gamercard analysis (what proportion of people with gamercard profiles come from each region), PSN analysis, Nintendo Channel analysis along with public reports and overall market size estimates - one project we undertook last year was to produce an overview of the 2009 market for clients based on all public data and split by region, so we have a good grasp of how large each region is, but obviously that is a dynamic thing and will change from year to year. We assume that the Asian markets are picking up marketshare and have modelled rates for each platform but until we have hard data to correlate that with, then the models and estimates may not be totally correct. This is a dynamic site, with constantly changing markets, many of which are hard to track directly. There will be adjustments from time to time - the only way to avoid this is to turn VGChartz into a full-on worldwide tracking service. This would likely cost a few million dollars a year to fund so either you need to be prepared to start paying extremely large subscriptions to see the data you want to see (which isn't how we're doing things, in fact the standard membership model I discussed previously isn't going to be happening) or just take our data for what it is and understand that while it will not be 100% perfect, it is normally in the right ballpark. |
Thanks for taking the time to explain, Brett. Really appreciated.
I suggest editing the OP and editing the thread title, so people would stop whining.
