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Ryuu96 on 03 September 2025
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zorg1000 said:
trunkswd said:

We had no way of tracking digital software sales, which is the main reason we stopped doing weekly software estimates. We now only report sales numbers (and total number of players) from official sources. That does come in more infrequently with Capcom, Nintendo, and Take-Two the best at providing updated numbers every quarter.

As far as hardware there were 2 main reasons for the change to reporting them monthly rather than every week. 1. Weekly estimates would be less accurate that would require adjustments once monthly data came in (ie. Circana/NPD), so doing them monthly meant the initial estimates would be more accurate. 2. I was getting burnt out doing the estimates every week for well over half a decade and having to adjust the numbers rather often. Now I mainly only need to adjust once the quarterly earnings report come in. 

I totally understand the reasoning, it’s largely out of your control, but still a site where the main focus is sales data getting less sales data is inevitably going to result in a decline in activity.

Yeah, it's one of those thing that we can't really do anything about, I've said it for a while that VGChartz has really lost its "USP" aside from the hardware tracking, but I still agree that removing software sales was the right thing to do, software tracking was just going to become ridiculously inaccurate so we had to remove it, the team didn't want to put out obviously bullshit numbers which is a good thing.

VGChartz already has an incredibly negative reputation which stems from its early days and has nothing to do with Trunks, credit to Trunks that he has actually tried to repair some of VGChartz reputation, trying to make clear that VGChartz numbers are just estimates and we don't claim to be 100% accurate, explaining how we do our tracking, etc. But the negative rep that this site has from its early days is hard to break through, some random ass estimate site will pop up with no history and people will be like "Look at these numbers!" (Alinea Analytics) but VGChartz is posted and it'll be an instant reaction of "LOL VGCHARTZ!"

We're dealing with a negative reputation which predates the current team, that can only be chipped away at with tons of effort and outreach, a loss of a USP which can't really be brought back so we either deal with it or find a new one, and we still have hardware tracking but the console wars are dying and far fewer people care about hardware sales nowadays without the console wars, which, this site was very much born off the back of console wars, Lol. Even if that wasn't the intention.

But nothing can be done without investment, Lol. The site is ran entirely on the back off unpaid volunteers who have their own lives and jobs, a lot of us aren't experts in what we're doing. The site hack showed how seriously flawed this site is, the hacker was a twat but he was right about the state of the website, and I was less angry at him, more angry at the state of the site as a whole, it was a complete embarrassment.

Last edited by Ryuu96 - on 03 September 2025