SilentWolf said:
A free fan-based website can also be much more biased than one with more of an image to keep intact. Sure NPD is probably biased as well(and being paid off for some titles they review), but think about their industry; if all of the games they review were perfect because the company was paid off, soon enough the magazine won't be considered any good and even getting paid off will not keep them in business. A similar case could be said about VG, but they don't have as much on the line. NPD has to keep their image good otherwise they will not see enough money and fail. They have to stay professional by being honest as much as possible.
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Ah yes and true but you forget 1 thing... the beauty of monopoly Who is competing with NPD? No one is. Thus they can get away with pretty much anything and everyone will still use them since we really cant tell if they are telling the truth or not. If there were viable competition then thats a different story but this is not the case here. It the same issue we have MS and windows. They illegaly (and were found guilty of this) killed competition early on and in doing so pretty much got away with anything later. Bad security? Who cares, its not like they have any alternatives so lets take our time and not fix them till someone actually reports it. Someone lost their life savings because of a well documentd trojan? Not our problem it took 3 years to patch the exploit. This is what monopolies can do and NPD falls pretty much under that category at this time.
I think everyone is taking the numbers much to seriously anyway. We all know that neither sources are 100% accurate and they may both be biased. Just take it as a grain of salt which is what every company does anyway. Im sure they have their own internal methods for getting real numbers.