| ioi said: Others software numbers should always be taken with a +/-20% accuracy week on week. They are not perfect, but far better than you guys are suggesting here and a very good indicator of how a particular game is performing. I'm not sure how the 22% UK comment is relevant? Where do we feel that vgchartz is overstating UK figures? |
Despite the UK hitting 1 million sales at VGChartz later than reported elsewhere (after a major adjustment) the UK accounts for more than that percentage of total 'other' sales on VGChartz, which includes a lot of countries outside of Europe where the Playstation brand is traditionally more popular than other brands (India, South Africa, South America, Indonesia, etc, etc).
Assuming a +/- 20 % can still cause quite a gap, although taking NPD's figures into account numbers for the US / North America may well be less accurate. An example, if 'game 1' sold 1 million copies and 'game 2' sold 800,000 copies, 'game 1' being undertracked by 20% would be 800,000 reported sold and game 2 gets overtracked 20% 960,000 copies sold could be reported. For comparison purposes I think that's destructive, if both are being overtracked or undertracked it doesn't matter much for comparison purposes. But comparing to NPD's data the 360 seems to be structually overtracked and PS3 figures structually undertracked, as such discrepancies until now happened various times in a row before adjustments.
Another example, based on what local retailers told me the Uncharted & R&C bundle is selling well over here and I believe this bundle is available in several European countries or so I've read (in some countries you can [also?] hand pick between other first party titles like Heavenly Sword, Uncharted, etc instead). Yet according to VGChartz Ratchet sold only a little over 3K worldwide for last week (minus North America and Japan), to me that sounds to be off quite a bit. I think just some things to take into account, maybe it helps in determining if data is structurally miscounted and where potential problems lie.
