Stever89 said:
mike_intellivision said:
If what has been said here is true -- if we never see the NPD quarerly data -- we have no idea what adjustments are made.
Meanwhile, everything VGChartz does is seen by all.
That leads to (mis)perceptions about accuracy.
Mike from Morgantown
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Exactly. Though I'm tired of discussing the NPD stuff, this is so true. NPD comes out, reports what they found, and then the companies quote them, and then things go back to the way it was. But there's two problems with this. - If NPD changes the numbers, we never know. The companies may know, but they're not going to come out and say something about month(s) old data.
- Everyone says that NPD is "used by all companies" and this is true. What's not completely fair is that there's no one else to quote. So obviously they are going to quote NPD, because there's just no one else to quote.
- Going with #2, people seem to think that this makes them more accurate. In all technicality, that is not true. Without any competition, there's no way to say who is more accurate, because without a second opinion, you can't choose, so you quote who you have, but that does not make them accurate. Obviously if NPD were way off every month they wouldn't survive, but that doesn't mean they always hit it on the nail, as was seen in December when they were way off (for the Wii at least). NPD is off one month (and seems to have been off the last few months before that), and everyone still "accepts" them as the standard, while VGChartz differs from them for one month, and all of the sudden VGChartz is not accurate and losing credibility? The fact that VGChartz could become a "second opinion" makes VGChartz a threat.
- If we just adjust to NPD everytime we are way off (more than +/-15%) then all we'd really be doing is reporting NPD numbers and giving an estimated weekly sales, which is hardly better than using your own data and calculating what the sales would be according to your samples. As everyone has said about competition in the console industry, the same applies to tracking firms. The more competition, the better. So adjusting to them every time doesn't make us more accurate. It makes us a copycat, and thus shows we cannot even believe in our own (NA) data, so why should they believe our Others and Japan data?
That about sums it up I'd think. |
