Well - I hope we agree to update numbers after quarterly financial statements from platform holders are released. They can only stuff channels so much (there is so much of everything these days, I doubt any company can afford too horde too much hardware - unless its something like the Wii, which will just sell instantly atm).

...

Nothing will make me happier than seeing qrt'ly statements from MS/Ninty/Sony validate the sales figures of VGChartz - and prove that NPD is undertracking specific consoles. It might be enough to shake the industry to the core. 

For now - just about everyone will live by the NPD figures. Ninty will get all the kudos, and there will be more "brushfires" breaking out about NPD vrs VGChartz figures.

Glad to see you are sticking to your principles ioi :) 

Any bets on whether Microsoft uses VGChartz or NPD in their press release?

I do agree with shams, this will make the flamewars hard to maintain.  VGChartz says the 360 GHIII is an all conquering hero while according to NPD its just one of the bunch (and not even in first).  Depending on which numbers you use the situation in the video game industry is quite a bit different.

And yes ,Ratchet didnt do too well but in most stores it was released the 30 remember that .

@ albionus

ha ha ha

While I can understand your thoughts that NPD might not be accurate themselves and I agree. The differences seen here at IMO much too big to ignore. A 50% difference in hardware AND software? That's beyond a simple disagreement.

You mentioned that your formula is consistent internally among the consoles but do you think that maybe your retailer sources have a statistical bias towards varying consoles? Bodhisveta's thread about ToysRUs I think is a perfect example. They skew heavily on wii sales and according to his recent convo with a MS rep, they mentioned best buy sells the most xbox. Maybe there's just an overrepresentation of those retailers in your data set.

I'm not sure having the same formula for all 3 consoles is necessarily a good idea. At least that's the impression I got from reading your statement about "applying the same methods across all the raw data for all the consoles." Maybe your formulas are actually different.

shams -- the whole reason for this decision is because the financial reports combined with sell-through data were proving to be very different from what NPD was saying and yet in line with what our numbers were *before* adjusting for NPD, so ioi decided to stop adjusting for NPD and go with the real numbers.

People can correct me on this:

From my understanding NPD does not include Walmart, Costco and other retailers - is this correct? If so, which retailers do they track?
Because these retailers are BIG retailers, which I assume can move more product - compared to smaller retailers.
If they do not track these retailers, do they extrapolate and estimate their sales?
If not, then by definition, NPD would always undertrack sales to "end users or consumers".

Can someone clarify?

NPD estimates sales for Wal-mart and the rest they don't track.

Oh this is not a time to get a hard head ioi. I've been saying for awhile that we've been overtracking 360 sales and now it's apparent. Including Canada and what not 360 hardware sales for the month should be at tops 400k. I'll hope you'll at least take into consideration NPD numbers to make sure our numbers are at least somewhat comparative to this.

I'm not trying to be bias but 360 sales need to go down and hard haha. They've bene overtracked and now its obvious.

Including the Guitar Hero w/ and w/o for 360 tops it'll be 550k when we include Canada and whatnot so it still needs to go down.

And I hope we'll also raise our Wii sales.

I mean I respect that you want to keep your own numbers and think that you are more correct than NPD but there are a few things that has been overtracked and at the least X360 hardware is one of them.

Here's a little clarification on that Sony 100k number.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=amjWQwK2k3Bs 

Tokyo-based Sony cut the PlayStation 3 price by $100 to $499 on Oct. 18 and introduced a $399 model on Nov. 2. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft dropped the price of the cheapest Xbox 360 to $280 from $300 in August. Wii sells for $249.

The price cut and new model helped Sony increase sales of all consoles including the older PlayStation 2 to 100,000 units in the week ended Nov. 11, spokeswoman Kimberly Otzman said in an e-mail.

Harrison said Wii sales during the same week exceeded that number by a ``double-digit percentage. He declined to provide a specific figure.

The Xbox 360 outsold Wii, introduced last November, for the first time in September on surging demand for the software maker's ``Halo 3,'' made exclusively for Xbox. In October ``Halo 3'' sales totaled 433,800, NPD said.