ioi said:
Hmm, just got back from a break to find this thread. We haven't been actively (i.e on a weekly basis) tracking PS2 sales since things switched earlier this year so yes, the PS2 numbers are now outdated and a few million below where they should be. William has clearly jumped the gun and posted the article without checking first.
A general note on data - we basically have two systems, one that tracks weekly sales and one that tracks totals - this is the easiest way to provide totals data for games and hardware that we don't have weekly tracking for (older stuff generally). This should explain why data updates in some cases and not in others. Weekly PS2 sales in the USA and western Europe are less than 10k per week and running that through our normal extrapolation process obviously produces global data that is far too small since 90% of sales are in developing markets such as the Middle East, Latin America, India, China etc for PS2 - all of which we don't get any direct data for. For most other platforms, these markets only represent a few percent of sales so a simple extrapolation of data in known regions is good enough to get to the right ballpark.
Therefore, it is meaningless trying to produce weekly data for PS2 based just on what we collect for the USA / Europe / Japan which is why we stopped and all we can do now is periodically update the totals based on shipments and external reports from those developing regions, something I haven't done since last year. Typically year-end is when a lot of adjustments happen as most regions publish end of year data and we can compare our estimates and extrapolations and fix where we have under / over scaled so we will correct the PS2 figures early in Jan when this is done. Same with the Vita "issues" that seem to be of such unnecessarily high importance to some of the posters here.
Hope this makes sense, let me know if you have any more questions.
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That helps.
In the meantime, why not extrapolate using known buying trends (shipped vs sold in the known regions) on the shipment figures we have? That would give a good interim ballpark estimate, updated quarterly and revised anually.
