It seems to me that this site could use a bit of better PR work. I don't frequent these forums much, so I'm not aware of all the past posts by ioi, but perhaps there should be a prominent page on the site explaining the methodology and rough error range of the numbers. I imagine some of it's a bit secretive, but surely at least the info posted in this thread could be posted more prominently.

Basically I think vgchartz provides an excellent service, but it's a shame it has such a poor reputation. You can literally be banned on NeoGAF for mentioning numbers from the site. Most gaming sites won't post numbers from vgchartz, and when they do the comments are always full of posts explaining that the numbers are "made up" and completely untrustworthy.

Maybe you don't care what idiots on the internet think, but I can't imagine such terrible publicity could be good for the rest of your business. My advice would be to hold an interview with one of the more major gaming publications or even write a short piece that one of them would publish explaining more about what you do. Heck even just posting a Q&A thread like this on another site could do a lot of good for your brand.

It's great that you have a set of trusted partners, but you could really have a lot more if the dominant theory on where your data came from wasn't "out of thin air".

LOL. I cant call out bullshit when I see it? I can and will. What gives ioi a free pass? If he is trying to pull one over on people Im going to call him out on it and the attitude he portrays is worse than mine being he is the owner of the site and should conduct himself as such. VGC having info in Japan is very relevant. ioi made a claim that their numbers would be fine without outside info. Being that they publish global numbers that includes Japan. Considering they publish the Japanese numbers along with everything else then they are infact presenting the data in a fraudulant manner if they dont have independant numbers from japan. 

Wow you're riled up lol.

I agree with kowenicki.  You have been very rude through out this thread but your post history is similar to this style too. You're making assumptions more than anything.  ioi has tried explaining to you but you have acted uncivil, dismissive, and are acting like you know more than you actually do.  

What you are doing isn't calling out bullshit, you're just dismissing anything that you don't want to believe.  And if you do want to disuss things then discuss them, but being on the offencive and frankly just rude makes nobody look bad but you.

It's a given that the numbers here are to be taken with a grain of salt.

i would say it's been disappointing to me that vgchartz didn't develop into more of an "NPD predictor"

IE, you could count on them to pretty close to NPD for each console hardware, and maybe top 10 software.

I had hoped one day they'd become that, but there doesn't seem to be any trend of increasing accuracy over the years. They're really close on some consoles, then way off on others, consistently (and which consoles theyre close on, changes)

EVERY site or firm that makes such charts ranks sales based on estimates using the median value of their calculations, and most of them give a lot fewer explanations than ioi about their methodologies: why on earth if VGC ranks something this way, suddenly it becomes wrong, misleading and whatnot?

Because people don't understand what VGChartz figures represent, and despite ioi's explanations, some refuse to want to understand.

http://www.vgchartz.com/article/82746/editorial-why-it-is-so-easy-to-blame-vgchartz/

"Timely data is a much sought-after commodity, especially in the world of investment and retail where knowing the success of a product 12 hours before your competitors can result in a huge advantage. The way we track sales at VGChartz is pretty much realtime - we don't have to wait for data to be aggregated or sent over (in the case of NPD, at the end of the month, for some retailers). We can pull figures in minutes after the close of the day. Accuracy is obviously the biggest sacrifice, but that is the balance we have to manage. To some users of VGChartz data, knowing that a game sold 7 million copies on day 1 with a margin of +-0.5 million and having that data hours after the end of the day is more valuable than having a more accurate figure two days later. These are the people who understand the idea behind VGChartz and what I am striving to achieve with the service."

Well this more or less aligns with what I consistently say. Weekly hardware has about a 10% MoE, software about 20%MoE annual HW about 5% MoE and ltd HW about 2% MoE. Everyone wailing about PS3 ltd being higher than shipped when the 80million was announced when that was still only about 3% error and the 80 million was brand new information were being ridiculous. VGC made an adjustment in reasonable time and is within acceptable MoE.

Most people only wail and gnash teeth when the apparently egregious error has made their favoured platform look bad, or a despised platform look good.

Can I just ask 2 things:
1) Can we stop demanding that VGChartz change its service into something it was never intended to be?
2) Can we stop making claims without evidence to back them up?

As a newbie to this site, I originally thought the figures I was looking at represented actual sales to consumers reported back by retailers. Now, thanks to this thread, I know differently. I understand what I'm looking at. I understand its purpose. I know it's real-time estimations. I know the figures are the midpoints of probabilities, and if I want greater accuracy I'll have to wait.

My only suggestion to the admin might be to make this fact clearer generally, to reduce the chances of the site's figures being misunderstood by the VGChartz community and across the internet, going forward. (I found the methodology link on the site, but the editorial piece I quoted earlier I only found through a link in this thread. Plus, all the explanatory info given by ioi on this thread I would never have known where to find.)