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

[quigontcb]

mrstickball said:

DMeisterJ said:

ioi said:
"If the Wall Street Journal quoted VGC for a major game flopping, selling 300,000 units first week as a big-name title, have a stockholder reaction, all of the while your actual numbers were much higher, and better."

When has that ever happened?

I think he was moreso saying if it ever happened.

 

I was saying if it ever did happen. What if a major business/financial publication quoted the very inaccurate story that was on VGC a week ago, about MGS4 first-day sales? The "news" ended up being off...A lot, yet was considered a top-tier story.

It's kind of like a news channel constantly reporting news, facts, and figures, and then going back and changing them later on when someone else reports them. It's not a good model to live by. VGC is doing a lot of good, going for a community-based prediction system like TSE (and their owner has gone on to head up major software/entertainment analysis comapnies), but as long as the model isn't working, you lose credibility, and that's never, ever a good thing in the field of analysis - if you lose credibility, you'd lose your job.

 

Tell that to Pachter. A recent issue of EGM had a piece on him and his job in which he openly discussed his mistakes(that he reported to paying clients). It's all part of how things work, the same thing goes for us here sometimes. What about all of the professional analysts and industry insiders who stated the Wii would come in third place and that the PS3 would come out of the gate with guns blazing? Surely you don't expect VGC to be the one entity immune to mistakes...

Are you at all familiar with Media Create and Famitsu's differences in data? Should they just draw straws to see who is the standard and have the other close it's doors?

And since you made a news channel analogy, I'll make my own. What about when all of the networks were reporting that Gore had clinched the presidency over Bush? That was a pretty big flub concerning the presidency of the United States, it doesn't get much bigger than that in the news. Poodoo happens and they learned from their mistake. If the major sources for news in America can screw up something like that and keep their integrity, VGC shouldn't be thrown under the bus every time something is out of order.

Of course we all want a larger sample for data and we all know the NPD has the largest for America. What irks me is that so many people are acting like ioi only wants to operate on a 2-3% sample of the market. If it was so easy to get retailers onboard, I'd think the mighty NPD would be able to have more than 60% market coverage.