| Jabbamk1 said:
Good to know. |
No, numbers can be derived from things other than tracking the physical sales for themselves.
For example, if had the number of ice cream cones sold in a particular region for a particular month, you can also derive from that a number relating to how much ice cream was sold. If you know that typically one gallon of ice cream is sold for every 100 cones, and you know that 500 cones have been sold, it would be reasonable to "post" the number that 5 gallons of ice cream was sold. It's an estimate.
We know, for example, that VGChartz uses this methodology for tracking hardware sales. VGChartz algorithms, over the years, have been tweaked so that they know that when the Xbox One sells X units in a particular area, odds are the PS4 has sold Y number.
VGChartz is a small company that tracks global data, it is ludicrous to assume that they get physical numbers in every region for every piece of software, many estimates, particularly of smaller titles that are strongly focused on a lesser-tracked region, will be numbers derived completely from other data sets. They know that if PS4 has X units in A region, and sold Y units more in a particular week, and game of genre P with marketing budget S is released, the odds of that game selling a number is I%.
I wish people understood more about how tracking, in general, works. Even Sony's official "sell through" numbers are complete estimates, as there's no way in hell that every retailer in the world reports back their numbers to Sony. Sony themsleves will derive that number from their shipment figures, the numbers from the retailers that do report, and other factors like the number of new PS4s connected to the Internet that week, etc.
