Europe software sales undertracked ?

[Troll_Whisperer]

Pineapple said:

Troll_Whisperer said:

yo_john117 said:
Before everyone starts calling out Vgchartz remember that this is a free site that offers something that no other site can. EMEAA is a tough beast to track and I'm pleased Vgchartz has done such a good job thus far. Sure there are mess ups and such but like I said it's free if you don't like it you can go find a sight that does this better (which there are non)

If 'calling out VGC' is telling the truth about it then I don't think there is anything wrong with that. No one is bashing the site, it's just that people should know that SW sales in EMEAA should be taken with more than a grain of salt. We just stated how those numbers are deduced and how accurate they can be. Then it's up to each person to decide whether it's worth it or not. I think it is totally worth it, but we can't pretend that VGC is 100% accurate just because we're here.

You're not showing the full picture, though. The data isn't just based from the UK, although it is true that it largely is. The formula isn't "UK sales times 3.7" or anything like that. If it was, UK-heavy games would be constantly overtracked, and non-UK heavy games would be constantly undertracked. That's not in any way the case.

Furthermore, this site does weekly adjustments to their sales. At once (reliable) data is gathered, they change their old estimates. If you look at lifetime sales of titles, that's rather precise for most of them. And if you compare the first week sales of titles in EMEAA to the later "actual" numbers, it's nearly always within 10% of the correct number, which is what VGChartz has always claimed.

Finally, the reason for the difference between Sony's Ps3 software numbers (or actually to a larger extent Microsoft's X360 ones, as it released earlier) and Vgchartz numbers is that VGChartz EMEAA tracking before 2007 was practically non-existant, and 2007 was somewhat shoddy too. As such, it's not that software is constantly heavily undertracked in EMEAA, but rather that it used to be heavily undertracked (or even not tracked at all) in EMEAA.

It's true, though, that EMEAA has no data for plenty of minor titles. Titles that sell less than 20,000 in EMEAA often lack data, mainly because there are no to lacking numbers from financial numbers. That becomes a relatively large number over time, whiich means that while the individual sales of titles in EMEAA is usually relatively spot on, the "overall" EMEAA software sale numbers should be taken with a grain of salt.

So while what you said isn't actually wrong, it's pointing out only the negative side of the tracking.

Oh, and finally, all PC games VGChartz data is still very preliminary (before 2011, there was no tracking of PC games at all). You can't really trust any of it.

Ok, I gather that you have experience with the site's tracking so I'll take your word. I wasn't trying to say that EMEAA=UKx3 or anything, I guessed that there were some formulas depending on genre, etc. I heard that was the case (and seeing cases like PES, Australian NPD, etc. it seemed true).