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Stever89 on 18 February 2008
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Auron said:
 

Ok I will grant you 3 and 4 for the sake of argument. Now HYPOTHETICALLY if 3 and 4 would be true then ioi is a hypocrite because he adjusts numbers when Jap and Pal numbers are released so why not NPD?


It's really too bad that the NPD thread got so long, because I actually covered all this a few times.

He doesn't adjust numbers for Japan ever as far as I know, and since Famitsu and MediaCreate both come out with weekly data, he doesn't adjust to them. He'll adjust to the big threes financial reports, but NPD does it too (you just don't see it).

As for Pal region, I have a few points, which will hopefully make what I'm trying to say clear.

  1. The market size in each PAL region is much smaller than the market size of the US, and most are smaller than Japan (I would think only UK can rival Japan). This presents two problems, one of which PooperScooper mentioned, though he doesn't realize why it's not good.
  2. The first problem this presents is that 10% sample of a smaller market might not be as representative of that market as a 10% sample is of a larger market. Meaning, with 10% of the US data, you could make very accurate predictions, but 10% of the German market (which would only be like, 1/100th of the US market), you might not get accurate sales trends. So saying "if he doesn't have a good sample size in Germany than his sample size isn't good enough in the US either" is not correct. If he has 10% of the US market that's more than enough to get fairly close estimates of what the real numbers are (which he proves week in and week out), even though compared to 60% NPD has doesn't seem like a lot. Without Toys R Us and Wal-Mart, there's going to be guesswork, and estimation, so neither is going to be 100% accurate, so how is it to say that NPD is more accurate? As for PAL, he might not even have 10%, as it seems that PAL is the "weakest" market when it comes to tracking. Also, ChartTrack or whomever had those Germany and UK numbers said they track 80% of the market, which is probably a lot better than ioi's probable 5% (which, like I said, probably wouldn't be a representative sample of the market).
  3. The second problem is scope. With a smaller market, if you're off by 100,000, you might be off by more than 25% of that consoles real sales. In bigger markets, 100k is nothing. Overall, 100k here and there would make maybe half a million difference, but since he adjusts to manufacturing data, it's never going to get bad enough to be a big deal.

I hope that makes sense. Take a statistics course (i'm taking one right now), and representative samples make all the difference, which may be a problem for him in PAL regions, while not so in the US/NA.