Yes, I'm overhauling the entire thing. But why don't these match?

My suggestion is to discount Bioshock altogether.  You said that Demon Souls shouldn't be included because it had a few months to build hype.  Bioshock also had plenty of time to build hype due to its X-Box release.  AND you could even make the case that the X-box release wasn't a new IP because it could be considered part of the System shock IP.

Global tends to take into account only the first week of any region, not all regions combined.

Say game A hits Japan one week but the rest of the world the nnext week.  Global week  1 would only show those Japnese sales.

Where are you getting data for every region? For example, I can't get the entire NA launch, I can only get the USA numbers. I can't get Mexico, Canada, etc. numbers. Where do you get this, if it's possible at all?

I'm not getting complete data (we siimply don't have complete data to work with) but I am using all the data we have.  So you can those are realistically the minimum FW sales.    For the most part, I'm just combining US, Europe and Japan FW.   That should put you at least within 10-15% of the actual real global total.

Crap, I'm going to have to individually add USA + Japan + Europe for every game that didn't have a simultaneous worldwide launch. Hopefully, it'll be updated on the morrow.

Are you saying, retailers paying Sony full price just to sell to customers at a deep discount? Okay...

No what I'm saying is retailer's order there stock from the distributor , in the case of my local EB games store head office orders a certain amount of a game then they hold them at a warehouse then the store orders theirs from there once head office have done the orders , for where I live they do it for all stores state wide maybe even nationwide not sure , the pricing sales etc are set by them as well .  Publisher gets paid per game ordered from the distributor and they from the retailer .its why you often hear on here talk about shipped versus sold and why shipped is what the publisher cares about since he gets paid upfront or sometimes like what happened with GAME UK before going into liquidation they basically got stock from EA and other  3rd party publisher on a loan.

i hate to go back to when i posted about music back through 1999-2003, but i think Justin Timberlake said it best when NSYNC's No Strings Attached CD sold 2.5m units in its first wk.

(summed up) 2.5m first wk is great but it's all about longevity.

Nice thread that I missed. Any chance do this for Nintendo and MS as well?