Hello,

First, I must say this very important thing :

I am realy admirative of the work done here to gather every sales statistics, even if some mistakes, overtracking, etc... Happen sometimes, I can believe that the work behind it to gather all the data is monstruous. So congratulation for this really.

Just for my curiosity, how do you gather datas ? We know that Japan releases every weeks the hardware and software sales of the previous week, so it is just enough to copy and compil these data, but HOW do you do to gather US, Europe and RoW with only 6-7 weeks of delay ? These data can be found nowhere except...here actually. So I was just curious, no need to tell me exactly your sources.

It’s magic and fairy dust.

I can only speak for the area I'm responsible for - software. The initial figures we produce come from national retailers in each of the countries we do individual charts for (US, UK, Germany, France, and Japan) and are then extrapolated to produce an estimate that hopefully covers the entire country. Regional figures are then produced using a similar principle of extrapolation.

Those initial estimates I'll then adjust after publication, using various sales reports from official industry trackers (like NPD, GFK, BIU, etc.), press releases, further data we may have received, and so on.

P.S. Our Japanese figures are actually a mix of Media Create, Famitsu, and our own data, weighted to roughly a 3:2:1 ratio.

"from national retailers in each of the countries"

You have direct contact with these people and they provide you their sales reports ?

" a mix of Media Create, Famitsu, and our own data, weighted to roughly a 3:2:1 ratio"

So it means that every quantities we see here are calculated estimations ? no exact numbers of items ? (this is not a critic !)

For example the quantity of Switch at 176.591 units sold for June 30th might be a value to consider with +/- 3000 maybe ?

Yes, the end figures are all estimates, albeit ones based on data from 1-3 national retailers in each country we track. If we get -/+10% I'd consider that a great result; that's always my goal when it comes to making adjustments. Exact sell-through figures would be impossible to achieve without receiving reports directly from every single retailer, which of course is not realistic.