superchunk on 06 January 2014
| Landguy said: You can never agree on total sales to consumers on this site. It is pretty clear with todays inventory management systems, that at the end of any given day that M$ or Sony can get the total of all sales for that given day at almost every retailer worldwide. So, when people say that Sony or M$ are just guessing, it is beyond funny. 15 years ago, I ran Best Buy stores in Minnesota here in the US. The Best Buy Corporate HQ is right here. At my computer in the store, I had access to the total daily sales of any product for about 120 stores. If I wanted more info, I could call a friend that worked at corporate HQ and he could give me total sales for the whole company. That was 15 years ago. You guys think it is hard for Microsoft or Sony to have a relationship with the few hundred companies that actually sell their products to get a few key items daily/weekly/yearly totals? It would only take a couple of hours work to put the totals together EVERY day. |
They likley have agreements with the larger retalers... but not everyone. They sample the data like everyone else. Not to mention they don't have on-demand numbers. No retailer is going to give someone they buy stuff from on-demand info.
So MS gets some info, extrapolates that vs the shipping and uses that to get an idea of what it should be and then makes vague statemetns like "over 3m".
I worked retial for a decade too. Obviously the retailers know exactly what was sold... but that is company private information. Not something they just hand out to everyone.
