While NPD has point-of-sale information from over 1200 retailers representing 165,000 stores worldwide telling you what is selling, where, and at what price. They only considers a certain % of the retailers who sell consoles and software to the buying public.

There are many large retailers who dont report their sales to any company much less the NPD

They can be wrong take for example the wii it sold far more after launch than the NPD credited them for.

CONCLUSION I'm not attacking NPD and their knowledge on market trends....but i will say that there is far more wiggle room in their accuracy than people on these forums seem to think.

But coming into general games discussion and pointing out the inaccuracies of NPD figures amounts to going into a catholic church and telling priest jokes... you're not going to get a warm welcome here

NPD is a lot better then everything else. So NPD will be taken as fact a lot more then everything else. Including of course MS, Sony, Nintendo. In fact it is common to believe in NPD more so then the actual publishers / HW manufacturers themselves due to PR spin.

I guess your issue then is that you have absolutely no NA consumer sales data that's better than NPD. Even the first party companies will just cite NPD when they talk about consumer sales in NA so there really isn't any source for more accurate information and all you could say is how many units things shipped.

there is a difference between using it as guideline or believing it is 100% correct

VGC only needs very, VERY basic accuracy. It relies on getting the numbers out faster, and having a community to openly discuss them. These are not a substitute for accuracy, they are different values entirely.

If you're a forum dweller interested in game sales, your pre-VGC option was to cobble numbers together from across the world, and in the case of the US, have only the top ten SKUs, released 2-7 weeks later. With VGC, you have new numbers every week and a big database and 1000 other fans dissecting everything. Better accuracy from NPD a month later cannot compete.

As VGC improved, it moved upmarket. If you're an investor, your old option was again to cobble together WW numbers and sit on your hands waiting for US numbers. Now if game X sells 60K, and VGC reports 100K, that's good enough if expectations were 250K. Add to that a community which quickly finds pertinent inaccuracies, monthly comparisons with NPD, etc, and you can form a feel for what you can trust. Better accuracy from NPD a month later cannot compete.

Is this about all the people complaining about how the numbers are wrong because the x1 is ahead in NA?

I say that every time somebody says VGC is wrong.

The big three take NPD as fact, that should be good enough for us.

Nice to see someone with common sense. This is why Nintendo of America isn't panicking and Nintendo isnt coming out with a new console. NPD is just another tracker. Do they count local gaming stores in their counts too? probably not. With that being said people will be shocked when they Nintendo'd quarter release tomorrow probably not as bad as we think.

It's in the same vein as statistics. You'll never get a 100% accurate answer, but you can make a best guesstimate.