VG Chartz #'s are full of it?

[Bodhesatva]

Thank you for apologizing, Marc. I appreciate it, and I'm not even Rocket Pig :p

As to the second point: the reason why other companies cook their books is to make a profit. That is the motive. By fudging their numbers, these businesses give analysts a rosier picture of their business' fortunes, and stocks can rise as a consequence. This may be corrupt, but regardless of where it falls on the moral compass, it springs from a completely understandable motivation: greed.

So for many businesses, I absolutely agree that number fudging can directly lead to profits. The problem is that this isn't true for NPD. They would make less money if they fudged someone's numbers, because all of their other paying clients would abandon them. Therefore, the same reasoning does not stand for NPD as it would for Microsoft (As an example). This is the real issue most of us have with NPD suspicions -- we aren't being blindly trusting, we just don't see anything NPD stands to gain from being dishonest.