The Credibility of VGChartz

[thismeintiel]

Aielyn said:
I feel I should point something out.

By the reasoning put forward by Carl, the 3DS is also significantly undertracked. Worldwide sales on VGChartz to the end of September 2012 has it at 20.65 million, whereas Nintendo claims to have shipped 22.19 million by end of September 2012.

There seems to be a latent assumption that shipped numbers must be just ahead of sales numbers. I don't see why this needs to be the case. Obviously, they can't sell more than they shipped, but the fact that a shipment was made doesn't mean that it sold.

An example of this could be, for instance, GameStop ordering a large shipment, anticipating big Christmas sales... but getting very little interest. Should this happen, they would then ship all of the excess stock to a storage location. I'm not saying that this is the cause for the difference in numbers for the PS2, but it's not outside of the realm of possibility.

So don't just assume that VGChartz must be wrong.

The 3DS may be undertracked or it could have been in anticipation for the holidays.  You'll have to wait for this quarter's results to find that out.  As for the PS2, the only reason the anticipation for the holidays doesn't work is because of its age and isn't in great demand in the larger regions, so by this time stores can pretty accurately calculate how much stock they will need throughout the year.  And if there was an incredible amount of overstock, then Sony wouldn't be getting requests for more PS2 shipments.