| Kasz216 said:
Well... except for the part where his numbers generally are accurate statistically. There are adjustments? Sure... everyone has adjustments though. Including Mediacrate/NPD etc. The difference is their adjustments happen behind the scenes only to paying customers. If you ever add up montly, and then compare what they report for total sales you'll notice it never adds up.
So... if that's why they banned vgchartz numbers... they did so out of ignorance to how statisitcs work. |
They really haven't been, and it seems to have gotten worse recently. For the month of February in the USA, VGC recorded 550k hardware sales compared to NPD's ~1067k. NPD had 4 systems more than 100% higher than VGC, and the rest were 50-76% higher. January was better in terms of total hardware, but that was because it was a mix of over and undertracking. Not a single system was within 10% of NPD numbers. Software has also had huge discrepencies. Sometimes more than double NPD numbers.
In the UK VGC still has the Wii U 21% higher than the figure calculated from Nintendo's market share chart for 2012. The DS numbers were also higher than their shipments for weeks after Nintendo's numbers came out, and even now is only 100k below shipments for the end of 2012. Now this might make sense if Nintendo is basically discontinuing the DS outside the US seeing as they only shipped 20k outside of NA in the last quarter of 2012. However, VGC has recorded 123k DS sales outside of the USA so far this year. That isn't really consistent with such a small shipped/sold gap at the end of 2012. Now maybe later this month Nintendo will show that they shipped ~150k to Others, but that seems unlikely since they only shipped 170k in the same quarter last year, and sales are around a third of what they were last year.
No real issues with Japan since we usually get MC and Famitsu before VGC numbers.
It makes one reluctant to even want to discuss numbers that might be double or half a few months down the line. That gets back to the thread's topic of VGC being banned on neogaf. Let's say someone makes a thread saying DmC sold 365k in the US in January. Then the NPD numbers come out and it only sold 187k. How many times does a similar situation need to happen before they disallow such threads?
