ioi said:
We track direct sales in the major regions (US, CA, UK, FR, DE, IT, ES, JP) and we then use consumer data (players by region basically) to extrapolate for the remaining regions that we don't track directly. So to use a crude example again, we may pull data for a few million PS3 users and show that for Call of Duty the number of users in Brazil is around 3% of the number in the USA, for FIFA it may be 10% and so on. We can use this data to estimate how many copies of those games were sold last week in Brazil from the numbers sold in the USA (or more realistically, we take a weighted average across all known regions). Therefore, we can produce reasonable estimates in regions we don't directly track using known sales in other regions and ratios of players by region via consumer data. |
Oh, its a pretty good way to track sales for online games, but it can have huge disparity in tracked sales vs real sales for single-player, or primarily single-player games. Anyways sir, since you are very much reading this post please look into this article:
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-06-05-god-of-war-series-has-sold-over-21-million-copies
According to this official sales data, the entire God Of War series has been heavily undertracked on VGC, and this article dates back to 5th June, 2012. It would be nice if you could adjust the sales, and add your own estimates for sales which occured after May 31, 2012 (the date till which these numbers have been counted).
