April 2012 NPD 360 HW 236k, PS3 175k, Wii 91k

[slowmo]

cookingyourmama said:

slowmo said:
So Cookingyourmama if we take just January onwards the difference is around 100k betrween the 2 agreed? That doesn't suggest too many issues of tracking being too far out when comparing the two. I would say that it actually suggest they could be both accurate when taking the 10% rule into effect. Thanks for the data though.

Just to clarify btw I shouldn't have asked you to include December that was my bad as holiday months tracking are often miles out due to the difficulties in tracking. Also I doubt the figures are that far out now after adjustments.

I'll leave the rest of you to discuss as I don't think I have much more input I want to give.

If you take out December the difference is more like 150k~, but yeah it's not massive. The thing is tho all these few hundred here, and a few hundred thousand there all soon add up. I just had a quick look at the four months before December 2011 and during that period the 360 was overtracked by 7,000 whilst the ps3 was undertracked by 167,000, combine that with the four months after December and you're already talking about an imbalance of over 300,000 in the 360's favour.

That is of course assuming NPD are accurate, which again is another issue altogether people start going on about to suit their arguments.  I guess my point is that we're comparing estimates against estimates both of which get adjusted over time (in NPD's case they've been known to adjust up/down in the months after a mistake trying to fudge figures to look like they don't adjust as much).  It just seems crazy to get too serious about the figures other than use them as a general guide.