Ruh-roh: Simon Carless of Gamasutra/Game Set Watch analyzes VGChartz...

[alpha_dk]

Kytiara said:
Just a question here since everyone keeps touting "transparency" lately. Exactly how transparent is NDP? Do they publish where they get their data from, their methodologies, their extrapolations and their corrections?

I don't see why ioi "has" to do anything. This article seems to indicate that to be considered acceptable, ioi needs to publish who they get data from, what that data, how they extrapolated it, etc...

So what happens when he does that? People like NDP go to his retail sources and eat them up. Sorry but that sounds like a very horrible idea to me.

 

I tout transparency specifically *because* we don't get it from NPD.  Basically, I think VGC has to be the bigger person in this.

Now, I am not saying that Brett should have to do anything like release his sources, or anything like that.

But, specifically because VGC has a smaller sample size than other sources, it is much more important that we be up-front about its limitations.  As Erik Aston* said, we may not have the accuracy, but we have the speed.  If we are more up-front about the accuracy, possibly through colorcoding or uncertainty measurements, then most of the arguments of the detractors (who don't tend to know how to use the data in the first place) go away.

*By the way, nice responses in the OReilly article.  Especially with Apujunata coming right behind you and legitimizing your methodology by saying using VGC was basically as good as using NPD, although that's not how he probably saw it**

**Apu, since I know you sometimes show up here, Hi!  Nice seeing you around!