More NPD numbers surface

[MaxwellGT2000]

masschamber said:

Viper1 said:

Hey Shinblade, does haterade have a bitter taste?

1. Nintendo has an internal warranty tracking company that uses POS to track all units sold.  It's called Siras and it's far more accurate than NPD because it's used in all major and medium retail chains.

2. If 73k were the actual first month launch sales for Goldeneye, I highly down both Nintendo and Activision would openly state that sales were doing great.

3. NPD updates their sales every month behind the scenes.  Data in one month can contain sales information carried over from adjustments made from the previous month....both up and down.    BUT, NPD's published list doesn't have to contain those adjusted sales numbers.  They only have to provide their customers with those figures.

 

Some people give NPD far too much credit when it's simply a polling methodology just as VGC is.  And given that NPD never had sales tracking comeptition for many years people have simply come to take their data as gospel.  But they've been wrong many times before and criticized by many of their own customers (including Sony and Nintendo).

some other fun stuff about NPD,

Video games are actually a vary small part of thier total business

they are actually privately held and they are less than half the size of GFK

they also use consumer panels for some of their data.

Yeah I'm actually signed up to take those surveys, they ask you what you bought at Walmart, that way they get some feeling sales, but I feel that's a very poor choice, since it isn't a random survey, if you've ever taken statistics how you come about your data is probably the most important factor since it can make your final data flawed.

Here's the issue, anyone can sign up to take these surveys, the informed consumer/person enticed by their give aways are the most likely to sign up for the surveys, what does that mean?  The people that know they exist, what gamer segment is most likely to know NPD exists?  The dedicated gamer, the one that posts online, the one that friends go to for gaming advice, this skews your data greatly when the person surveyed is not the target demographic of the product being sold, it can invalidate all of your data.