I've noticed recently a lot of people are looking at the overall software sales of the various platforms, especially the relative Xbox 360 and PS3 software sales which are neck and neck. This got me thinking, can we really trust that the overall software sales are truely indicative of what is really going on in the software market? Is it appropriate to take the overall sales and make judgements like 'people are rebuying the Xbox 360 S' because the software sales don't show any real movement? Could it be the sales estimates don't reflect the actual reality of the market at retail?

Another thing is do we know how big the online purchases of Arcade and full titles are relative to the brick and mortar retail market? I remember the NPD thread had the 1600 point card as the top selling accessory for several months now. Further to that I looked online and I saw that the Xbox 360 has 127 disc release titles available. If people are indeed replacing their old 20GB Premium models especially, then they are able to take advantage of games on demand in a way they could never do previously so the games on demand ought to become more important as people attain faster internet and the HDD capacity to download games.

So overall, should anyone really look at just the sales we have listed here at VGC knowing that the sales are incomplete considering they don't factor in online sales and suffer from a larger margin of error in comparison to hardware sales to make judgement as to how a platform is performing and the overall active userbase size of a console? I think not, but feel free to disagree with me here if you want.

Some people were really frustrated (for no reason really) in the MGS: PW NPD sales thread because I was saying we don't know the PSN sales.

So yeah, I agree with you. Some games are harder to judge because of online sales.

A lot of older games on 360 are now on Games on Demand too. So we need to factor that in older game sales.

about the 360 s do you really think that the boost isnt 95% of already or old 360 owners,  you dont need to look at software, what does the slim do no rrod and built in wifi, for old 360 owners thats a reason to buy it, and for people who already own a 360 the no rrod is a reason to upgrade.

Absolutely not.

Check this out: VGChartz says BC2 sold only 310 thousand for PC, whereas more than 2 MILLION have been sold for PC as can be easily tracked from bfbcs.com which fetches the data directly from the EA plasma server. You can even check the stats of ALL THOSE players directly on that website.

Yet, VGChartz is trying at any cost to "force" consoles down our throat and to "show" that PC games are not selling well. Haha.

I just hate this trend.

And play FPS games with keyboard and mouse ffs. Playin FPS with a gamepad is like eating soup with a fork.