When a CEO of a company comes out on a big stage like CES and state something like "We sold the best in 2011", you can be pretty sure the people that reported that number made sure that it was correct. Making a fool of your CEO would be something that probably get you fired and Steve would not want to make such a statement, then get ripped if it was incorrect.

If someone believes that Sony would not dispute that claim if they had the numbers you are deluding yourself. There is no way Sony or Nintendo would let MS just get away with claiming first place.

Lets see the what did they do wrong?  They announced numbers. Then they had to back track and added shipped to retailers and that they were including the number of wands.  By that flawed method you could say the Wii has sold at least 250 million units.

Back on track MS has always used shipped numbers when they make announcements. Sony typically uses shipped / manufactured numbers. Nothing wrong with either method either. It just makes it more difficult for speculators when they try to compare the two.

As far as the person that said they haven't seen any official numbers from MS, well if Balmer said over 66 million you better believe its over 66 million. There are far too many shareholders that hate him and the stagnant stock price that hasn't increased despite their tech rivals that have and wish him gone and would love to catch him in a lie fluffing the numbers.

Neither end users nor retailers have any obligation to communicate sales from the latter to the former to MS, so MS can just collect as many sample data as possible and make an estimate of those numbers, like VGC, although as besides polling shops and cross checking with other trackers, MS has also orders and shipping data available, it can most probably estimate its own numbers more precisely, but not the competitors' ones.

Actually it might be over 3M on shelves... Well of VGC numbers are way off, as usual on holidays (according to some users)

I haven't "demaded" Sony won, I have proof in the data of this site.

Are you saying VgChartz sales are off? Do they have the Xbox 360 heavily undertracked? Is PS3 overtracked? These are all possible but you don't have any proof do you?

I hated that part of the game!

one thing is for sure....

there is not a single company, organisation,person, god, alien etc. who knows the EXACT amount of consoles sold at any given moment in time.

I would imagine its literally impossible (talking about sold to consumers not retailers).

Personally, i think even MS had to estimate WW 360 sell through numbers to some degree.

why are people still debating about who won the year? its damn obvious whats happened. microsoft over estimated and shipped way too many consoles. they beat sony in shipments but ps3 obviously sold more to consumers. this is even more true after recent NPD.

Again, NPD  is not the world.

I'm pretty sure reality is the opposite of what you just said.