Pre-NPD: Microsoft Expects To Trail In February

[Euphoria14]

ioi said:
@Mike B:

I've just looked back over the figures and to say that our Jan figures were miles off it totally unfair. Wii, Xbox360, PSP all showed around a 5% difference between NPD data and our raw US data - so spot on in other words (anything less than 10% is rediculously good). PS2 was about 14% lower, PS3 30% lower and DS 75% higher. PS2 is again pretty good so only PS3 and DS were really of any concern to me last month.

DS was sold out at some retailers and in good supply at others - I can understand there being some large differences although as I explained last month I feel NPD were far too low and we were too high so you'll see I adjusted our figures somewhere in the middle, also after talking to Nintendo about their shipments.

For PS3, some of our sources only give monthly data, which we don't get until about a week after the end of the month. There had been a huge increase in PS3 sales last month at electronics retailers which we hadn't really seen in our weekly information. This has been taken into account this month and hopefully our data will be much closer.

I do wish people will give a bit more credit than they do sometimes for consistently putting out free data every week which is often within a reasonable margin of error of the data put out by professional tracking services for many thousands of dollars. To be getting so close on such a small scale is something I am very proud of and I wish people weren't so quick to jump in the minute your favourite console doesn't sell as well as you hope.

 Do not fret, there are many here who appreciate all the work you and this site puts in to insure we get the most accurate sales data for the consoles we all love to whine about and/or praise. Big deal if sometimes things are a wee bit off, nobody is perfect. All that matters is that you guys are so unbelievably close and sometimes you are spot on and that is why I choose this site over any other for my gaming sales data as well as gaming news.

Never get discouraged. We all love you here. :)