December 2015 NPD Thread! PS4 and XBO exclusives LTD up!

[binary solo]

Aquamarine said:

Shadow1980 said:

That actually would be a great idea as well. VGC has always had a significant margin of error that always needed to get adjusted once the "official" trackers published their figures, though it's still better than nothing and post-adjustment numbers seem to be more like a Famitsu vs. MC thing. I can understand why some people have been critical of the site's week-to-week tracking. If VGC would step up its game and tried to become an "official" tracker with the same tools and methodology and access to more accurate data, that would be amazing. Despite the initial margins of error, I've always appreciated that VGC at least tries to have publicly-available sales data. They're really the only place that does that, and I've always hated how NPD has gotten so damn secretive about everything until NPD_Muclair started posting at GAF. I mean, it's just sales data, not some super-duper trade secret.

I know, right? And NPD used to even give GAF numbers from like 2006-2008. That was the hook I was able to use. "Hey NPD George / NDP_Mulcair, you guys gave GAF numbers before, just do what you used to do back in the day." And eventually it worked, but only thanks to the new guys. A year ago when they were harassing me it would have been impossible.

I've made posts on GAF about the issues of VGC accuracy before and that still rings true today. Sometimes VGC is pretty accurate...other times it's far off the mark. I personally can't trust it because I can see the discrepancies are significant at times but hey, gotta give them credit for at least trying.

But that's really easy to solve. If VG Chartz could establish a relationship with Walmart, Target, GameStop, Best Buy, and Amazon, they would effectively become as relevant as NPD.  They would have 90% of the sales in the market. Now of course, 90% accuracy isn't as accurate as NPD, mind you, but it's still pretty damn close (NPD is 95% accurate). Close enough that lots of institutions would start paying for them. Hell, we'd buy a subscription to them.

It's all about expectation. If people have some expectation that VGC will have high accuracy week to week or month to month then they don't understand how VGC works and their expectations are unreasonable. The way VGC works in real time is giving us an indication of how things are going. Thanks to VGC we had adequate data to be able to say that the 8th gen belongs to PS4 and that PS4 was likely to even be #1 in the USA before anyone else. That's because the data was sufficiently in the ballpark to be able to draw some reasonably reliable broad conclusions of how the industry is playing out. 

The question is whehter VGC can change and improve its real time accuracy. It's trying to provide global sell through estimates. It basically gets the NPD data on a monthly basis in order to validate / adjust its US sales. It already simply reports the mean Japanese weekly sales reported by MC, Famitsu and Dengeki. Those are the only regularly reported sell through numbers out there. And they serve VGC's needs.