Bayonetta 2 has hit 1 million sales

[Aquamarine]

fleischr said:

Aquamarine said:

This is fundamentally ridiculous. NPD is never "wrong." 95% of their numbers are sourced directly from point-of-sale feeds from all of the major brick-and-mortar and online retailers. You can't be "wrong" when your data is comprised of actual sales receipts from the market.

Amazon is the go-to place for niche sales. Titles that proliferate on Amazon often flounder at more established retail venues like Walmart and Best Buy.

It is not a reliable indicator of NPD software sales rankings for that reason. Not to mention, there are many reasons why a random legacy title could have jumped up in the rankings. It's certainly not indicative of any trend or NPD inaccuracy.

You totally misunderstand NPD's methodology. They don't aggregate every single transaction from POS data. They build statistical models to provide estimates. They sample, and extrapolate - but there are characteristics of Bayo 2 to which NPD can very easily over-normalize inputs in providing an accurate estimate (e.g. being a mature WiiU title, the low install base, poor Japan sales, the publisher's previous release: TW101).

Add the noise of the NPD data being handed down not by NPD itself, but by a forum with only a little more credibility than VGC and you can see why I remain skeptical.

The top 10 - 20 retail titles for Amazon monthly do tend to fall in a pretty similar order as NPD and largely made up of mainstream titles. While niche titles do top the the hourly, the monthly/yearly figures do end up closely resembling  NPD.

The truth is that Bayo 2 was and still is yet a a leading piece of the gaming mindshare. It's now a highly valued IP to the dedicated army of Nintendo fans that show up for 1st party releases. To say it's sold less than 200k is far out of step with the game's prominence and vibrant community. 700k+ WW is way more believable.

No, YOU totally misunderstand NPD's methodology.

NPD currently captures at least 90% of total physical video game sales in the U.S., with the remaining 10% of the market projected by NPD for its monthly numbers. The 90% capture rate may have increased by 1 – 2% due to a data upgrade consisting of retailer additions, as well as existing category enhancements and methodology updates, which began with the September 2015 data feeds.

95% represents the maximum theoretical NPD accuracy. (i.e. they're 90% accurate in the worst-case scenario, and 95% accurate in the best-case scenario). Their numbers are estimates, sure, but they are almost COMPLETELY comprised of real POS numbers. The NPD Group specifically states that they have partnered with all of the major retailers in point-of-sale sharing agreements with which they use to aggregate their data.

I have NPD data and I know what I'm talking about. You don't know more than me in this area.