So, the gap is less than 3M now.

[Reasonable]

silicon said:

Reasonable said:

Outside of official accounting statements Sony can fudge numbers if it wants so long as it doesn't go too far - however it must be accurate regarding corporate legislation on sales, profits, etc. publicily posted.  That's a given.  Not sure why some posters think global publicaly traded companies can just ignore such things.  Actually, just to be clear, they can, but moslty this ends up like Enron, etc. with the guily party being found out.  I therefore doubt Sony is lying about it's shipments in any way.

Sony (and MS and Nintendo) should know exactly what they've shipped or received orders for.  Again, there is little room for mistake here.  If Walmart has 50K units on order then that will be know.  Equally if a small store has ordered 5 that will be known.

Note when they report these some rounding will always be in force and the figures won't be exact to that minute but probably a prior period by a day or so.  On the day something is annouced the true orders, to the single unit, might be for 2,103,455 units (random example).  That would be rounded for any public statements.  Probably up rather than down!

To your question will it matter to the market if Sony say they've shipped more LTD than MS despite what ths site says?  Of course it will.  That's a given and nothing against this site.  Investors, market researchers, etc. look to official company statements and performance a lot more than VGChartz or even NPD (which it itself estimates used to get an idea of trends/sales in addition to the hard, public figures released less often).

The 360s should delay the day of meltdown though, and might even prevent it (although I'm not sold on that yet).

I thought its standard to take the most conservative number which is to round down.

I agree with your comments though.

Well... I wasn't sure many would actually accept that so I went with the more humerous angle.  But you're right, unless it's a very loose bit of marketing spin most companies, if playing safe, will round down so they can never be accused of false data.