Global Hardware/US Software April 19th up!

[starcraft]

bananaking21 said:

starcraft said:

Actually, looking at most of ioi's posts about number veracity, you see that he doesn't mean for the numbers to be interpretted as exact.  There is a perfectly understandable margin of error (which is also true for NPDs margin of error - which is slightly smaller due to a larger number of tracked retail sources).

Indeed, week-on-week, most of the arguments in this thread is over the numbers that fall well within the margin, rather than the outliers.

Actually, no. XB1 was over tracked in march NPD by 60k, Averging it to be overtracked by 12K weekly, where it sold 62k weekly in reality (on average) and VGC showed it to track 74 on average weekly. thats overtracking it by a 20% margin. 

but thats not the point, the margin of error excuse can be said a billion times but it doesnt hide the fatal flaw, which is that in the past month or two, vgc has showed that the xb1 is outselling PS4 in usa, while it hasnt, and it continues to do so when it likely isnt. 

The very point is that NPD also has a substantial margin of error (though I would never argue this margin is as big as VGC's).

You get what you pay for.  Ultimately ioi has to rely on a small percentage of retailers to produce weekly numbers (by waiting, NPD can of course wait for firmer numbers from a wider range of suppliers).

Eventually we'll get region by region shipping approximations and get a better idea of what is really going down in NA.  Until then, so much complaining about a set of numbers never claimed to be 100% and provided entirely for free!