anamme said:
Not so ridiculous. Are you a vgchartz pro member? If so, you have a valid reason to complain because your paying for information that is often way off the mark. If not, then your getting it free like most of us. How about appreciating the fact that this site exists at all, and has provided us with a good place to debate and vent our worst fanboy instincts. It doesn't matter if the vgchartz team pretends like they are the holy grail of sales data (which I'm not saying they do), you should have enough common sense to know that these numbers won't always be that accurate. I'm sure the mods all have day-jobs and personal lives to attend to as well. |
You're right. I do have common sense, which is why I'd never pay for VGCPro even if I had the money to do so. Just because it's free, doesn't mean I can't offer criticism about the methodology and the presentation however. To me, there is large dissonance between what they think they are doing and what they actually are doing - at least in terms of how it's presented.
And like I said, it's crazy how they publish the precise numbers as they do. From my understanding, they collect data (if any at all) for a particular game or platform, run it through some equations to extrapolate on regional levels, and then publish whatever number they come up with. The problem is, what is there starting data and how can they possibly estimate out to the nearest unit. Just as example, there is no noticable difference between their reported sales of 158,346; 158,907; 159,623; 160,721; or 161,914. None, and it likely goes further out than that. What is the starting data they have here between these kinds of sales, and how much of the slight difference is just statistical noise? How can they possibly say one game sold more than the other here and rank them? I'll bring it up again because the response was not satisfactory - there should be no reason to publish to the nearest unit when you state they are estimates. The only difference between publishing 158,346 and 160k is that one number is precise and appears correct and exact while the other is rounded off, appearing much more of an estimate (which it is) with reasonable doubt attached (which there should be). And that's one main reason why the numbers they publish are misleading.
