You realize there's a lot more to Europe than the countries he listed. Especially considering the difficulty of predicting markets that are so dissimilar.

As everyone's saying, thanks for the adjustments ioi! Nice to see an effort to make tracking more accurate.

And since you brought it up Michael-5, here's a thread I made almost a year ago regarding God of War 3's sales: http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=144437 (Just updated it recently). And according to NPD it sold 1.1m in the US during its first 4 weeks vs. 1.04K Vgchartz estimated, not a huge difference until you consider bundled sales were tracked separately by NPD meaning it could have really been at 1.2m in total which would be a fairly significant difference.

Yea, but UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Benelux, make up a large portion of Europe. I can't imagine Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Serbia, Bosnia, Romania, Greece, etc buying 15-20x as many PSP's as the main European countries. Plus why is only PSP adjusted up in these regions?

Remember PSP in Europe before this adjustment was only 1.5k weekly, now it's over 20k weekly.

Still, whatever, glad it's been adjusted now. I'm really shocked at how well PSP is doing, I haven't been looking at outside sources much, and I was really happy to see GBA edge out PSP before. Guess not anymore, Sony products always do well after the gen in over in South America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. I mean look how long the tails are for PS1 and PS2's annual sales!

The basic reasoning behind the recent hardware adjustment is that our numbers are pretty good for the USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Benelux, Australia and Japan regions. The data for those regions hasn't seen any major adjustments and our numbers are very much in line with any independent data in those regions (within say 5%).

It is the remaining regions that have seen the bulk of the adjustments - Latin America, the rest of Europe, Russia, Asia Pacific and Africa - where we essentially have to extrapolate and "guess" the sales based on past trends. When manufacturers release data and we are 2-3m out then it is clear that we are severely under-tracking sales in these regions so we adjust to the best our our judgement to try to bring the discrepancies down to an acceptable level to represent likely units in stock.

Data for the main tracked regions listed above covers about 85-90% of the total market, but in some cases (PSP and PS2 being the most extreme), these regions actually only account for 10-20% of the current weekly totals - the majority of units for these platforms are being sold in the upcoming and developing markets, which is why our normal extrapolation formulas fall down. We know that the tracked regions only account for a minority of the sales but trying to judge how small that minority is can lead to massive swings in the extrapolated numbers so we tend to side with caution and go with the lowest estimate.

It is my goal this year to improve tracking in these regions - especially in the major AP countries like Hong Kong, Singapore, China but also in Eastern Europe and the Middle East where there are significant (i.e millions) of PSPs. PS2s. PS3s and to a lesser extent 360s being sold that we aren't able to track.

If people want to help, the best thing you can do is keep posting data that gets released for these "developing" regions. The more data we have the better we can extrapolate and estimate for the regions that we have missing.

As ever, thanks for your patience and understanding.

GT5 isn't available digitally.