January 2018 NPD Thread! Switch #1

[Nuvendil]

Kerotan said:

Nuvendil said:

Amazon has ALWAYS only ever been relaible at predicting ranks NOT SALES NUMBERS.  This has been accepted for years yet in recent months a revisionist, false narrative of it being used to predict numbers and ratios has been drummed up - borderline invented from whole cloth - by people who, for whatever pitiful reason, want to discredit the practice of tracking them.  And so I will say again - and again and again and again if necessary - the Amazon charts predict the end month sales RANKINGS not numbers nor the gap. 

End of story. 

Move. On.

In reality this issue arose from the fact people were claiming switch would win npd by big margins because of amazon data. People rightfully pointed out how it's Switch biased so that's not the case. Ironically your post was revisionist regsrding the root cause of this. 

There have always been people throwing guesses out.  No one made an issue of it until recently.  And no one ever used that to try and undermine the threads.  I'll have you know Amazon has incorrectly said PS4 would win 5 times since 2013 but no one ever lost their crap and said Amazon was unreliable and shouldn't be trusted because of Sony bias. Because Amazon isn't used for that.  If people make ill advised guesses, that's fine.  The revisionism comes in with people implying that Amazon was once a reliable predictor of sales and gaps but now isn't because of dat dastardly Switch bias.

Also, the "bias" is simple to understand.  Switch has 2 SKUs.  So all sales AND all resales are tied to two ranks on Amazon.  PS4 has several bundles, some available from Amazon and others from resellers.  Therefore, the sales are dispersed over more rankings, thus lowering the positioning of each.  Xbox, same thing.