I wanted to keep the OP objective, but then I had to run out before I could lay down any of my own opinions on the numbers. Firstly, thanks for the praise so far. Secondly, I do have faith in VGC's numbers. It's all we have for worldwide weekly totals and they may not be perfect, but that's not possible for anyone to do the way things currently work. I believe the hardware is more than accurate enough to get a good sense of trends in the market, and thus I'll comment on these numbers as if they're concrete. Furthermore, this far into the generation if I think something is overtracked or undertracked, then it is probably only by a few hundred thousand at the most and over the course of the lifetime of the console, not one month or quarter. And as for the software side, I think it's fairly good also, but simply harder to track in general. Usually useful to tell if a game is a blockbuster, has good sales, or is a bomb, but not completely reliable to say X outsold Y. I wouldn't rely on any other tracker alone to say the same though either.
And now some analysis:
Glancing over all three tables and using plain old logic, it's pretty clear that the Big 3 generally "overship" in the July-Sept quarters as retailers want enough stock during the holidays to come the next quarter. Oct-Dec is a bit of a mixed bag where either shipments or sales can be higher. Again using logic, the shipments will "win" when retailers expect the console to be a hot item but it doesn't quite live up to expectations or when MS pushed enough units through to meet their 10M goal. Meanwhile, the sales will exceed shipments when it is the hot item, as in the Wii since its second holiday season, the 360 in 2008, or the PS3 last year. Finally, Jan-June have almost always been consecutive quarters for excess 360s and PS3s to make their way off store shelves. Nintendo was still struggling to meet demand for the Wii in its first few years, but lately they are falling into the same expected pattern.
@Kynes
That may be true, but I can't say for certain. I do know that Sony no longer simply counts units produced(which includes demo units, replacement units, and unsold units sitting in their warehouses) as shipped. It may be true that they count any unit ordered(even if it hasn't been produced yet) as shipped, but then again Nintendo or Microsoft could count the same way. I would think that financially the sale occurs when money is exchanged and that is when the units should be counted, but I don't know accounting laws/rules like that to say how it actually goes.
@Serious_frusting
It does seem to me that PS3(and likely PSP and PS2) are a bit undertracked, most likely due to the smaller, hard to track markets that Sony has expanded into. That could account for some of the roughly 2 million unit difference . However, unless ioi is "baking" estimates of those markets into Others or other regions, then we'd expect the gap to widen instead of remain pretty consistent for 2 years now.
@mike_intellivision
I did think about doing a regional breakdown; however, I think Nintendo is the only one that's ever really done that as far as shipment numbers go. So while that would still be pretty interesting, I'd rather not go to the trouble if I can't do it for Microsoft and Sony as well.
Oh, but I did decide to make the tables for the handhelds as well. I'll edit within 24 hours.
