yeah :P it's hard to detect the sarcasm in forums xD

Pretty much.  The paranoia's getting thick in here...

Sony used to count 'Production Shipments' which meant unsold internal inventory or even unmanufactured retail orders placed would be counted.  That always led to numbers dramatically higher than sales trackers.  In 2007 they switched over to a new accounting method that included only 'shipments', but it's still not exactly in line with Nintendo's stricter accounting methods.  Dunno about Microsoft?

No, Sony's 'shipped' includes units still within the company's internal distribution or warehousing, so long as they're already sold to retail.  The change is that they used to also count unmanufactured 'sold' units as well as unsold excess stock they might have built up.

Nintendo is the only one I'm sure of who only counts literal 'shipped' units they no longer have possession of.

so they shipped in that way 2M PS3s? nah.

So *everyone's* undertracking PS3?  Keep the conspiracy theories coming...

the only number that is wrong for sure is VGC worldwide, because NPD is only in the US so canada isn't even in there, then theres japan which is just one country and GFK only covers europe, so we still got the rest of asia (besides japan), canada, australia and who knows what else unaccounted for 

GfK covers more than just Europe, it also covers some Asia-Pacific, African and Middle Eastern markets.  Notably Australia, in fact.  NPD also has tracking services for Canada, though we don't get the numbers all that often.  Usually Canada's about 8-10% on the US historically though, so we can get a good general idea.

In terms of major markets, the only real big mystery imo is probably Korea and some Southeast Asian markets.  Even those probably can't account for that much in terms of hardware though...

So in other words your saying npd is basically guessing Canada and GFK has more countries as basically an after thought, which I doubt are all that accurate, so yea, chances are the regions they don't major in numbers are off considerably, either that is MS is just paying them to lie about ps3s numbers, which even I think is a little out there, though I don't doubt that they paid off a few companies on the 360 failrate studies 

i think ps3 has been selling way better than any of us thought. thats it, theres nothing more to it. sony know their numbers better than us or vgchartz.

The way things are are very simple :

Sony ships 1.2 million last quater = Sony is doomed

Sony Ships 2.4 million= They obviously overshiped

There is no win, all I am waiting for is for the shipment to pass the 360. Retailers are so dumb to keep buying those PS3 each quaters.