ioi speaks out about ergh "VGC analysts"

[anamme]

MaskedBandit2 said:

I dont understand the post about error percentages, bell curve analysis, and probability. To me, it seems like a weak attempt at an excuse for publishing bad numbers.  You say you're not "wrong" if you publish 600k and VGC says 485k. That's a 24% error, and a difference of 115k units! How is that even acceptable? As mentioned, it only gets worse as numbers scale higher. A 20% error of 2M is 400k units. That is definitely not meaningless. You're validation for this is that NPD has a margin of error as well, and does the same thing that VGC does? Naturally there's error, but it's going to be much smaller.

And when I look at actual charts, if you want to say the numbers can't be wrong and you're just using probabilities, why are you even publishing these ridiculously precise numbers. What's the difference between saying one game sold 238,854 and another selling 241,913? Heck, what's the point of even publishing the high figures this site does if you're saying they can fall in such a large range? It doesn't take much thought to know a game like GTA is going to sell in the multi-millions. If you're saying the numbers can't be wrong because they fall within a decent portion of a standard distribution, despite being off by a couple million, what's the point?

Bye then.