It's very common to use old numbers.  They may be the most recent trusted numbers, for example.  Sony benefits huge from this, since they shipped a ton of extra units and are getting a ~20% bump from the site as well in terms of their performance at the time.

But these numbers are not the last trusted numbers. And even if they want to use old numbers they shouldn't claim these numbers to represent the sales after 1 year on the market. 

they probably are shipped numbers,but then again why didnt they post ps3s shipped numbers up until june but posted higher numbers

There are two choices here:

Ignorant: The journalist is an idiot incapable of checking the net to see that the latest quarterly data is not June but actually September. Any journalist writing an article on this should be expected to do more research than was apparently done if ignorance is the case. In short, this is piss poor journalism and if it is indicative of all of his work he is a bad journalist.

-OR-

Dishonest: The worst of the two options. He went with the data that made his fanboy sense tingle the most. Nothing much to say here except that this is top notch douchebaggery and makes him the lowest scum of the journalism world.

Conclusion: Either way he is not a good journalist and in the end the article doesn't effect much if anything so it isn't worth getting upset about.

And I'm not understanding, Wojtas, you never attacked the writer because his data was old, but inaccurate, which is false.

The fact is those numbers are 100% legitimate and accurate. The problem is, which you never argued, is the fact the numbers are old, whereas the article is very new (which makes the journalist dumb for not reading the most recent Ninty, MS and Sony reports on sales to retail/distributors).

But calling the article "BS", and arguing they are modding the numbers to suit their own bias is wrong.

@mrstickball,

There is a legitimate argument to be made that it was intentional with bias. I won't make the argument but you can't dismiss the fact that they ignored more recent data and are supposed to be professionals. That begs the question to be asked and while I don't think we can answer it I definitely don't think we can dismiss it either.

I agree with the rest of what you said however.

...But even for that, one random article written by a uninformed (or stupid, or biased) journalist isn't quite a great reason to post about it on VGC.

Now, had be been using numbers like "X360 - 10m, Wii 8m, PS3 5m" would be really, really off and wrong. But again, he's using legitimate numbers, but old numbers at that.

Yup, I agree the numbers are valid, but I think an "as of June" is the bare minimum you should be able to expect from a professional.  In that regard the guy could have just been lazy.  Either way it is bad journalism.

But I really have to agree that it didn't warrant its own thread....which leads me to wonder why I have posted so many times on this topic now