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Barozi on 06 June 2012
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Zim said:
Barozi said:


Hey Barozi, really great thread and definitely something that needs to be examined closer as Digital Distribution gets bigger. 

However I thought I would warn you that it is best not to use gamasutras xbla information. It is so inaccurate as to be totally useless. I remember their 2011 analysis was truly terrible. Through simple extrapolation using offcial MS sales ranking it was easy to calculate that some of their margins of error were over 100% for some games. 

They had listed Uno as around 200k sold in 2011 but through comparing it with officially released rankings and other games leaderboards it was actually below 90k. Likewise I think they had ilomilo as about 50% overtracked and so forth. Basically the system of leaderboard numbers = sales that they use doesn't work in the slightest, and is so far off as to be useless. 

A big thing is that it's not only couch co-op that affects it but multiple gamertags on a single 360. Buying an arcade game once, but then playing it with 2 or 3 different tags on the same system = 2-3 entries on the leaderboard for one sale.

It's among the best what we have right now. Leaderboard numbers are the same for everyone who checks them, so it's not so much their fault.
Multiple Gamertags is definitely an issue that exists, but that just can't be estimated. Personally I'd think that the numbers of multiple Gamertags with Xbox Live access on one Xbox is rather low.
Obviously every console has tons of offline accounts, but they can't post leaderboard numbers.

Furthermore there is a rather large numbers of Silver accounts (about 40% of all Live accounts). They certainly don't need to be connected at all times, so I guess there is a larger number just buying the game on XBL and then playing it offline. No one is going to buy the WiFi adapter only to be connected with a Silver account at all times and not everyone has large and/or enough ethernet cables/free router ports.

The issue with online couch co-op is that the game encourages you to play with a friend online. If it's a good friend he already has an account and his game record will be posted on the leaderboard, if he isn't a close friend, he will probably just play as a "guest" account.


All these factors make it incredibly hard to get a good picture of the actual sales. Obviously no one here is pretending that every game here is within the 10% error margin. Still it's better than nothing and the only thing I can do is pointing out the games that are heavily influenced by certain circumstances (bundles, freebies, online couch co-op).