Adinnieken on 13 January 2012
| makingmusic476 said: Those 360 numbers are fucking with my head. It's times like this we realize just how little we know about what we don't know when it comes to shipment/sell through data and the reporting of such. |
There is another factor, returns.
Retailers as of December 26th in the US were reporting higher than anticipated returns. Especially on Black Friday deals. This could have been the cause of some of the numbers looking good on one end, but not looking good at the other.
A return would look like a sale in the given week it was sold, but all of a sudden at the end of the month, the retailer has an unexpected increase in inventory and the console has a reduction in sales. I doubt VGChartz tracks returns, other than as inventory on hand. It's entirely possible that shipments to retailers and returns collided making it look as though the channel was stuffed with inventory.
