360 Numbers don't add up!

[Erik Aston]

Monty, I’ve been following this debate for awhile, and hopefully I can help. Since we’re looking primarily at NA sales right now, lets see what vgcharts has so far for NA sales… ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 X360 Nov 05 362,000 362,000 2 X360 Dec 05 312,500 674,500 3 X360 Jan 06 277,000 951,500 4 X360 Feb 06 178,000 1,129,500 5 X360 Mar 06 213,000 1,342,500 6 X360 Apr 06 328,000 1,670,500 7 X360 May 06 245,000 1,915,500 8 X360 Jun 06 307,500 2,223,000 9 X360 Jul 06 228,500 2,451,500 10 X360 Aug 06 226,500 2,678,000 11 X360 Sep 06 288,000 2,966,000 12 X360 Oct 06 242,000 3,208,000 13 X360 Nov 06 567,500 3,775,500 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Now lets look at what you listed for NPD numbers in US only… ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Nov/2005 330,000 Dec/2005 280,000 Jan/2006 250,000 Feb/2006 160,000 Mar/2006 190,000 Apr/2006 300,000 May/2006 220,000 Jun/2006 280,000 Jul/2006 210,000 Aug/2006 20s0,000 Sep/2006 260,000 Oct/2006 220,000 Nov/2006 510,000 http://forum.pcvsconsole.com/viewthread.php?tid=11067 Add those up and you get 3.410 million units sold. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Lastly, let’s look at the percentage of sales that the US number accounts for each month… Nov2005: 91.16 Dec2005: 89.6 Jan2006: 90.25 Feb2006: 89.89 March2006: 89.20 April2006: 91.46 May2006: 89.80 Etc. These numbers are extremely close and consistently put US sales at about 90% of the NA totals, but IMO with enough variance that we know vgcharts are not merely adding a certain percentage on beyond US numbers. Puh-leeze don’t accuse them, directly or indirectly, of fabricating the numbers. I’m sure we can give them THAT benefit. Now, I would guess, though I don’t know, that these numbers don’t include Mexico. I would guess that the 10% increase in vgcharts data come entirely from Canada. However, if solid Mexican numbers don’t exist, and if they account for a statistically unimportant amount of data, and assuming that vgcharts doesn’t count them for any console, then there is no problem with that. It doesn’t show bias towards any console. If its important to you, you could look up vgcharts numbers and the reported US numbers for other consoles, and see if the appearance is about the same in terms of percentage US. Now, lets address December sales. NPD reported that XBox 360 sold 2 million in November and December through the 25th, right? Wrong. CNBC reported that NPD was their source but NPD denied it. Oops. http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/752/752823p1.html Official NPD numbers won’t be out until the 11th. Now vgcharts doesn’t do “up to the second sales,” so lets not go off their “old estimate” which may not have even included all of December. Lets take their current number and say, for the sake of argument, that it goes through December 31. Right now, their number is at 5.26 million. 5,260,000 - 3,775,500 --------------- 1,484,500 December sales currently estimated by vgcharts That means that vgcharts is estimating December sales are a 262% increase over what was sold in November. Now the original XBox was only the primary console MS had on sale for 4 years, but due to the console launching in November, and Halo 2 also launching in November, we only have TWO comparable years to use for comparison with the XBox. In 2002, XBox went from 518,000 to 1,144,500, a 221% increase, and in 2003, Xbox went from 512,500 to 1,198,000, a 234% increase, both far less than 262%. The 1,484,500 number exceeds the 1,432,500 estimate for December we’d get by subtracting the 567,500 number from the unsourced Nov-Dec 25 estimate of 2,000,000 by only about 50,000, which seems low for those last week of Dec sales, but then again the 2,000,000 number is a giant round number which we don’t know the source of. Bottom line here is that vgcharts may actually be estimating a particularly large Nov to Dec gain for 360, but that’s due to change when actual NPD numbers come out on the 11th. Now, if you want to say that the numbers are off merely because of the possibly missing Mexican numbers, go ahead. But you can’t say that shows any BIAS unless you can show where the other consoles are charting considerably different in a NPD US sales vs. VGCharts NA sales comparison like I did above. Other than that, you should wait for ACTUAL NPD numbers, and in turn, VGcharts ACTUAL December estimate. When we see their actual number for December, there won’t be all this guesswork. I mean, some of the discrepancies we’re talking about of 200,000 or 400,000 or whatever, could be covered by a single week of December sales, and we don’t know the date the current estimate goes through! No point in talking about this until the 11th. One last comment. We can say it ought to be easier to track one country over another country outside of the context of VGcharts, but its more relevant to say that the VGcharts Japanese estimate ought to be closer than their NA estimate when those are the estimates they actually MAKE--a fact which is true BECAUSE NA is tracked only by country, and Japan tracked as a whole.