| fireblazerx17 said: I'm sorry, I did some googling but still can't really understand what this means. Would anyone be able to explain it to my little noob self? |
COMG is a fairly small (~10 stores) chain of game shops in Japan, and on their website they keep a daily chart showing how much the top 20 most pre-ordered games have been pre-ordered (we assume, the chart will say 100points rather than 100 pre-orders for example, but it's widely assumed that 1pt = 1 actual pre-order)
Now generally speaking, the average ratio between the number of points on the chart a game has on its last day and the number of copies a game will sell in its first week is 1pt = 1000 sales. However, in actual fact this varies massively, as you can see in Kresnik's chart, from a few hundred to 2000 or 3000. However, if you compare the performance of a given game with other similar games in the past, you can get a better idea of how that new game might sell.
Say for example that there was a new Dragon Ball game on Vita, which got 52pts on COMG. Now the first Dragon Ball game on Vita had 23pts and sold 22,346 copies in its first week, meaning that its points ratio was 1pt = 972 sales. Now assuming that the demographics on COMG and the sorts of games its customers like and dislike stayed the same, we would use the ratio and times 52pts by 972 to get 50,544, which would be a rough idea of how the new DB game might sell in its first week
Of course this a more labour intensive way to use the chart - lots of people just like following it to see what's being pre-ordered lots, or which games are ahead of others, but you can take from it what you will. It's not perfect either - when games have more than one version available, for example a regular copy and a limited edition, one may show up but not the other, so we don't know the exact number of pts, which is why some of the figures in these tables have greater than symbols, because we at least know a minimum from the one or two versions that did turn up
Hope that helps, join us in the COMG thread if you want to follow the charts, they get posted everyday (exact time will differ with your timezone, they come out a midnight here in the UK now we're using daylight saving (GMT+1)
EDIT: Beaten, wasn't even close :(
