ioi said:
The basic reasoning behind the recent hardware adjustment is that our numbers are pretty good for the USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Benelux, Australia and Japan regions. The data for those regions hasn't seen any major adjustments and our numbers are very much in line with any independent data in those regions (within say 5%).
It is the remaining regions that have seen the bulk of the adjustments - Latin America, the rest of Europe, Russia, Asia Pacific and Africa - where we essentially have to extrapolate and "guess" the sales based on past trends. When manufacturers release data and we are 2-3m out then it is clear that we are severely under-tracking sales in these regions so we adjust to the best our our judgement to try to bring the discrepancies down to an acceptable level to represent likely units in stock.
Data for the main tracked regions listed above covers about 85-90% of the total market, but in some cases (PSP and PS2 being the most extreme), these regions actually only account for 10-20% of the current weekly totals - the majority of units for these platforms are being sold in the upcoming and developing markets, which is why our normal extrapolation formulas fall down. We know that the tracked regions only account for a minority of the sales but trying to judge how small that minority is can lead to massive swings in the extrapolated numbers so we tend to side with caution and go with the lowest estimate.
It is my goal this year to improve tracking in these regions - especially in the major AP countries like Hong Kong, Singapore, China but also in Eastern Europe and the Middle East where there are significant (i.e millions) of PSPs. PS2s. PS3s and to a lesser extent 360s being sold that we aren't able to track.
If people want to help, the best thing you can do is keep posting data that gets released for these "developing" regions. The more data we have the better we can extrapolate and estimate for the regions that we have missing.
As ever, thanks for your patience and understanding.
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