| TheSource said: I was going to do an editorial on all this but I think this works better: We get sample data every week for the Americas, if it weren't classified I could post it from last November through last week which is the period for when I've seen it. Its just not enough store variation for some software so there has to be a concerted effort to look at shipment info, how similar games performed on hw at a given time, etc. The real advantage NPD has over us isn't the larger sample size, so much as it is the diversified sample. But still, it is just a larger sample size, and since it covers the majority of the market, but not all of it, and tends to be conservative, we aim to put sell-through figures closer to shipments. NPD isn't perfect, whenever I talk to some of my contacts I hear stories about how NPD changes figures after public release, and spreads out the changes over months, supposedly conflicts between NPD and Microsoft internal figures happened for months on end at Microsoft. We're not taking other people's figures and predictions since those are flawed and subjective. We have a sample, we weight it for the data that is provided. Most games perform in a similar pattern in spiraling down from week one sales in the sample data, and that is reflected on the site. Adjusting to NPD figures would be silly given that they do not cover the entire market, but if the pattern is different from what we have there is no reason not to recognize it as reflective of 60% of the market in the cases where we have limited data. Its not like we do (Pachter x 2)+(NPD x 10) + (Sample x 3) and divide by 15 to get data or something. Frankly when we have data that is diametrically opposed to what NPD reports we ignore it, when the data is similar we have no reason to change it, it when a game falls in between those two ends because our sample wasn't diversified enough for propper scaling then we go back and weight the sample information differently. That isn't copying NPD, thats us being modest and recognizing that our scaling factors don't always hold steadfast. So if No More Heroes or something sold better nationally than in our sample, it just means we're scaling up the sample, we don't copy NPD, we just use it as a better idea for weighting tough to track games closer to shipments. If NPD didn't report data we would still be able to provide weekly data from using our sample by constantly looking at the number of stores in a given market, comparing our coverage to that figure, and making the necessary adjustments to weights based on shipment data.
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^ There's far more information here about VGChartz's method, than information publically available anywhere about NPD. How's that for transparency?
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