Shadow1980 said:
said:
There's something I've wondered about for a while. I've been working on my own charts, and I've found that, at least when it comes to older consoles, shipment numbers are much easier to come across than actual sales numbers. I'm at the point where I'm almost ready to give up on trying to figure out global sales and just settle for charting shipments.
But it did get me thinking. Couldn't the shipment numbers themselves be used to estimate the likely number of sales? I realize it's not an exact science and there would be a margin of error, but don't the shipment figures tell us something about sales? I mean, what kind of sales threshold do manufacturers wait for before shipping more units? We must have a rough idea.
I realize it would be a different number depending on how fast they're selling, but there must be a minimum number of units they aim to have on the shelves at all times. This may not give us accurate week-to-week sales figures, but at the very least, couldn't shipment data (both the timing and the size) be used to estimate likely sales figures over the long term?
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Well, shipments do provide an upper limit. For example, from September 1, 1986 to August 31, 1987, the NES shipped just over 1.8 million units in North America (it shipped 210k in the previous Sept.-Aug. period, but it was only available in test markets then, being released nationwide in September 1986). That means that the NES sold at most only 1.8 million units in its first year on the market.
But yeah, the dearth of readily-available sales data for older systems is kind of annoying. NPD apparently started tracking sales in the U.S. in 1988, but no concrete data for systems older than the PS2 exists on the internet (I'm trying to remedy that as I'm waiting on a response from someone at Neogaf who has older NPD data). In Japan, Famitsu only goes as far back as 2000 and Media Create only started tracking sales in 2002. For Europe, VG Charts is the only one who has yearly sales data for the region, and they don't have anything prior to last generation, at least not anymore. I hear they used to track PS2 sales, but that data is long gone.
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