360 Numbers don't add up!

[Monty]

Erik Aston said: I can't wait for the actual numbers to come out... NPD will report a surprisingly strong December for 360 in the US (as everything points to so far), Vgcharts will report about 110% of that for their NA estimate, as they have consistently done, and then what are you going to do, Monty? I've stopped following the thread when you stopped even responding to me Monty, but as far as I can tell, you don't have much to say about Vgcharts Nov05-Nov06 NA estimates, without making assumptions (some of them rather grand) about Mexican sales. If Vgcharts just does what they've always done, I think your argument is shot Monty. Very much looking forward to tomorrow...

You don't seem to understand the problem here, Erik... everybody keeps citing this 10% figure... telling me it's been that way "forever" and that "everybody" knows about this, and it's the way "everybody" does it. However, NOBODY can show me where they are getting this, and I can't find anything to support that notion. I also can't find anything to suggest that Mexico is included in the 10%. And as you stated in your last post, you deem Mexico "unimportant". And, while I can't find any exact figures, I would say evidence points that that isn't true (an official launch, an "emerging" country in video game sales, a recent big event to launch a single game (Viva Pinata), etc... ) Anyhow, NA was a smaller point in the big picture as it was the easiest to find figures for and compare. While I showed earlier it was 400k off, you replied that it was likely because vgcharts was out of date and I was going off their "old estimate" and that 400k could be made up in a week or two. I have no problem with that "out of date" theory, but it would definitely be nice if vgcharts displayed a rough idea of when the stats are up to date through. For all we know, they could be showing the totals for Dec 1st, right? How would we know any different? One of the problems with this debate is that the numbers have changed about 3 times since we started, and we're now 10 days into January... if the figures are up to date (as some suggest they are), then it's about impossible to argue their NA figure as I am no seeing that I have NO idea what vgcharts is reporting as its Dec 31st NA number anymore!!! Some of you say the site is horribly out of date, some say it's up to the minute.... I guess we need to figure out which it is first!