I can't remember if I've ever been there, but just by rep alone I will NEVER give them a hit by going there.  That's how websites go away.

Then again if it wasn't around the trolls might have to find a new outlet like . . . HERE!!!!!!!!!!  

well, people there look down on VGC and people here look down on N4G

well for a start that particular article is wrong, and for second you must admit after recent events on here showing that ps3 was doing much better than most people expected, vgc has lost alot of credibility, maybe you would understand where they are coming from now, but yes i agree about n4g being a trollish site.

some of that article was nonensense it actually detracts from how well the ps3 is doing, but i believe fanboyism has died down considerably and the games and consoles are speaking for themselves. What i don't get is people who can't make there own minds up. I can give clear reasons why i would not get a console over another why can't some people just honestly look at strengths and weaknesses and decide over that rather than spouting reteric to deter people from making informed decisions.

Couldn't agree more.

Some serious ps3 fanboyism on those comments. Kinda sad.

Did I miss something or did VGC just do another correction for the PS3?

Last I checked, the gap was just over 5m between the Xbox and PS3. It now sits at just under 4m and for the first time, it now has over 25% marketshare.

It's a bit pointless to be splitting hairs over this given that the Xbox should be getting a significant boost over the next few weeks leading into Black Friday with the Kinect debut, but this does go to show that VGC numbers are NOT set in stone. Like many things, they are subject to corrections as more information becomes available, meaning the old standby of "shipped vs. sold" may not be able to explain why the numbers may be even closer than currently tracked.

A few years ago Nintendo estalbished an independent tracking firm called SIRAS, which tracks many products (including video game consoles) by their serial numbers every time a sale is made at participating retailers, which include K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Toys R Us, Gamestop, Target, and several other stores I can't think of off the top of my head. Subscribers to SIRAS are able to know how many units are sold, which units are sold, where they are sold, and at the specific times that they are sold. THey can track trade-ins, warranty claims, warranty frauds, on and on and on. All of this, to the best of my knowledge, is done automatically and requires no further reporting on the part of the retailer.

Nintendo and one of the other hardware manufacturers (but not the third) are SIRAS customers in the US. They know exactly, down to the unit, how many units of hardware they've sold in the US at any given time. They use NPD numbers for press releases, and they also use NPD for sales tracking for software.

They can't and they don't.

Manufacturers get for the most part delayed visibility to sell through via two main avenues:

• buying sales data sold by the retailers to trackers like NPD, Neilsen and the like
• sel through summaries passed back at regular intervals by the retailers

Few retailers pass back immediate sell-through info to their suppliers - i.e. sale by sale - although obviously the flow of orders, etc. allows manufacturers to also estimate sell through rates - i.e. how often does the retailer order and how much and what does this reveal about sell through.

This is normally balanced to updates from the retailer - I've sold 85% of last week's shipment, etc. and data from NPD, etc.

What is often missed is that for the most part, once the goods have been delivered, visibility is within the retailer only, and a time lag is introduced when retailers release summary of performance to trackers, etc.

So, the manufacturer can get a pretty good feel of sell-through, but it is based on periodic snapshots rather than what's happening real time.

I'm not suggesting that they don't have any idea, the regularity of retailer orders and summary reports of the major retailers from trackers should give a fair indication, should they have the resources to compile that data.  The issue is if this number would be accurate enough to put in a quarterly financial report over the more tangible, concrete shipped numbers.  

There's also the question of why shareholders would care about consumer sell-through numbers anyway? Once they've been sold and the company has been paid end of story as far as they're concerned, why even entertain the idea of attempting to track consumer sales at retail and make their numbers look worse?