Hello All,
Every so often, since I started the XBLA charts, I have been asked "Why don't you track PSN sales too?". To which, I have always said "I can't, until trophies launch".
Well, it seems (and I don't keep up with every part of Playstation news, because I don't own the system) that trophies are low live, and at a minimum, SSHD has them available for unlocking.
I have posted a few comments in the trophy league about tracking sales, but I feel that this question needs to go beyond those that are involved in winning trophies, as I am sure the number of Playstation fans that want PSN sales might be a little larger than those that take interest in the leagues.
At any rate, to begin to track PSN sales, here are a few things that "I" need to begin to track them..I hope these questions can get answered about availability. This will also help explain how I track XBLA sales, and how we can track PSN sales under a similar, accurate system.
To track XBLA sales, I use Gamercards. Those quaint little things in many X360 fanboy's signatures (including my own). As it is now, many PS3 owners have them too.
However, there is a big difference between the gamercards that 360 players use (right now) versus PSN trophy cards. Whenever you go onto Xbox Live, your profile and gamercard information are downloaded to Microsoft's servers, and are able to be accessed by anyone - Over XBL, or through the internet by going to your gamercards homepage. It has all of your gamerscore information, accessible from your fingertips.
Because of the fact that this information is automatically taken from every XBL gamer's card, sites such as MyGamerCard.net sprung up, and created a database of willing particiant's gamercards. It tracks (litterally) millions of Xbox 360 owners, and their gamerscore from every single game that has ever been available on the X360. This is an immense amount of data, and it's what I use to derive my XBLA numbers from, and thanks to some work, my XBLA numbers are now considered the most accurate XBLA numbers publically available...Many developers use my XBLA numbers now in many, many different ways.
Now, I say all of this to ask: how do Trophies work? I know they are achievements/milestones like the X360's Achievements. However: How is this information tracked by Sony? Can you share your achievement info online? Is it automated? Can the information be accessed by anyone?
If a few Sony fans can answer these questions for me, I think we can begin to determine how PSN game sales can be tracked. Obviously, the metric we have to use are trophies, as I don't believe there is (or are) any other availale metrics outside of Sony and their press releases.
Furthermore, does anyone have experience with PHP or XML? If we can track trophy unlocking, I do believe we could start up a PSN Trophy Community project, similar to the one here. What we'd need to do is sign up our own PSN IDs, and those of our friends (if they consent), to the project. Again, if we can track how many trophies have been unlocked within the community, and grow the community, we can attain larger and larger sample sizes. If we do that, then we can extrapolate to whatever I/we feel would be the correct numbers for PSN Game sales, and track them weekly like the WiiWare/VC and XBLA sales threads that are available.
So feel free to share your insight and opinions on this, so we can get the ball rolling on what's available.
Back from the dead, I'm afraid.
