WW HW + SW week ending 31st Jan

[binary solo]

Jabbamk1 said:

SamuelRSmith said:

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.

That doesn't explain how you can "track" a game which is one month from release and rank it as the 45th best selling game in the USA for that week. Perhaps you missed the fact that THE GAME ISN'T OUT YET!

 

 

Actually it does. If the release date isn't updated in the database - which is the actual error here - and the data sample does not have that game among confirmed sales the algorithm will still estimate sales that the data base tells the algorithm it is on the market. This does nothing to prove the sales estimate system is broken or unreliable. But it does seriously call into question the reliability of the game database management.

If you know how statistical modelling works you'd have understood these things, so whatever you do with the market research business it seems statistical modelling isn't it. Is it bad that vgc has recorded sales for a game that isn't out yet? Yes it's bad. But not for the reasons you are suggesting.