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Forums - Sales Discussion - VGChartz Tracking vs. Reality (PS4)

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What do you think about VGChartz tracking of the PS4?

3M+ overtracked 44 6.89%
 
2M+ overtracked 15 2.35%
 
1M+ overtracked 38 5.95%
 
Spot on! 53 8.29%
 
1M+ undertracked 300 46.95%
 
2M+ undertracked 37 5.79%
 
3M+ undertracked 39 6.10%
 
Who cares? 47 7.36%
 
I do care, but won't vote. 44 6.89%
 
TL;DR 21 3.29%
 
Total:638
Aura7541 on 01 October 2014
wary-wallaroo said:
Aura7541 said:
wary-wallaroo said:

No I don't, because even without China, the PS4 should easily be outselling it by 100k plus, so that 100k won't put it on top. As I've said before, VGC will put it on top for the week but I've no doubt it'll be adjusted down in the future, just like it happened this year.

And beside, I don't think it did 100k on the first day in China, wasn't that shipped? Or did we get actual confirmation it was all sold through?

The 100k was shipped because otherwise, MS would have already clarified that they are sold through a la Sony's 10 million PS4s announcement in Gamescom. Neither have we heard MS saying stuff like "the X1 is selling gangbusters in China and we're struggling to meet up with demand from retailers."

That's what I'm assuming too. And even if they did sell through 100k, the PS4 should still be on top (again, once adjustments come in). 

From what I'm seeing from Gamestop and Amazon top sellers lists, both PS4 SKUs are still outselling the standalone X1. I expected Forza Horizon 2 to push the X1 past at least one of the two SKUs, but it never happened. It might have been attributed to Shadow of Mordor even though it's a multiplat (the reports of power disparity might've done something). So, at least in the US, the PS4 is outselling the X1 on FH2/China week. The question is by how much?

Europe is pretty predictable, not to mention that the continent will be receiving the white PS4 Driveclub bundle. It'll also be getting a Far Cry 4 and LittleBigPlanet 3 bundle in November. Japan, of course, is also an automatic win and we shall see how much the limited edition PS4s help boost sales there.



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wary-wallaroo on 01 October 2014
ioi said:
wary-wallaroo said:

Yup, sounds about right. To this day, I still don't get why it's only PS consoles that seem to suffer from sometimes severe undertracking. Never seems to be an issue with Xbox, and hell, it's much more prone to being overtracked. I wonder if there's any truth to the whole Neogaf rumors about VGC's banning.

 

I'm sure VGC will put the X1 on top a few weeks this year, before inevitable correcting their mistakes in a few months to show that the X1 didn't actually win a single week. Hell, this week feels incredibly undertracked.

Then you clearly never read any post I make on this subject.

Playstation sales tend to be strong in markets that don't have great coverage - Eastern Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia, South America - the best we can do in these regions is make broad estimates based on past trends, active populations and data that we collect in the more traditional regions such as the USA, Canada, Western Europe and Japan (which represents over 80% of the total global market).

It really isn't that difficult.

And that makes perfect sense, however, if tracking is bad enough in those areas that VGC is off by hundreds of thousands of units (and like 1 million+ come the next Sony update), wouldn't it make sense to just adjust numbers up (again, with actual numbers) once they come out by putting them in an "other" category? Probably far from ideal but if the tracking in a lot of regions is too tough, there'll be no way of really knowing where the extra sales are coming from.  

When I say it'll show the X1 on top and then below come adjustments, I mean it in the sense that after the last adjustments, it turned out the PS4 had won almost (or every?) single week this year, whereas before, there were a few that showed the X1 above.  Hence I believe that VGC tracking will show the X1 ahead for the week of China's release, but then it'll be fixed when we get an update. 

Of course, I don't pretend to be an expert on any of this, so maybe there's some reason why that's not possible. 

EDIT: Saw you're second post, and I get that, but if you don't know where the extra numbers are coming from, how does one update a forumla to reflect that? 



DonFerrari on 01 October 2014

Yes there are severe mistrack on any week, but the accumulated is quite acceptable. Anyway ioi never said why x360 numbers were adjusted so fast with shipments figure (putting 1M overtracked in germany to top it) that he have to guess how much on shelves and channel but took almost 1 month to adjust ps4 even though they were direct sells numbers without need to guess. And even getting all the details from Sony (I remember he confirming to have received their data) he still kept around 250 undertracked (it was 900k off on a. 7M-10M interval. Tracked 2.1 against 3M that is 40% off, they had adjusted for 7M with may report and in q few months lost track completely... If it was a holiday period the total number difference would be obscene.



duduspace11 "Well, since we are estimating costs, Pokemon Red/Blue did cost Nintendo about $50m to make back in 1996"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=8808363

Mr Puggsly: "Hehe, I said good profit. You said big profit. Frankly, not losing money is what I meant by good. Don't get hung up on semantics"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9008994

Azzanation: "PS5 wouldn't sold out at launch without scalpers."

mornelithe on 01 October 2014
DonFerrari said:
Yes there are severe mistrack on any week, but the accumulated is quite acceptable. Anyway ioi never said why x360 numbers were adjusted so fast with shipments figure (putting 1M overtracked in germany to top it) that he have to guess how much on shelves and channel but took almost 1 month to adjust ps4 even though they were direct sells numbers without need to guess. And even getting all the details from Sony (I remember he confirming to have received their data) he still kept around 250 undertracked (it was 900k off on a. 7M-10M interval. Tracked 2.1 against 3M that is 40% off, they had adjusted for 7M with may report and in q few months lost track completely... If it was a holiday period the total number difference would be obscene.

I think it's likely that the numbers that Microsoft released to them, iterated the regions where the units were undertracked.  That's just a guess though.  I've no idea why they wouldn't receive the same kind of information from Sony though.



Namiirei on 01 October 2014
Aerys said:
 


N4G.com is even worst, most clickbait site on the world


N4G is horrible, it just take ""news" from others random sites/youtube video/etc and add them for clickbait..

Never again.

 

" I expected Forza Horizon 2 to push the X1 past at least one of the two SKUs, but it never happened"

--> Well, forza fans already have a X1 since forza 5, so of course another forza won't change a thing...it will be the same for forza 6, forza horizon 3, etc..



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Wonktonodi on 01 October 2014
ioi said:
BraLoD said:

Did you read the OP? I'm not considering any adjustments.

Why would you not consider adjustments? That would make your logic seriously flawed and shows that most of you really don't understand how VGChartz works.

The currently weekly PS4 figures have the same adjustments applied as all of the data that has come before it. So if we previously estimated that a region represented 2% of total global sales and now believe that it is closer to 3% then that adjustment applies both to historical data and to all data from this point forward - it's not like we have gone back to 2% and will need to adjust the current weekly data back up to 3% again in a few months time.

This is the point I try to make about how we do adjustments - we don't simply add some numbers here or there to fudge the historical data, we adjust the formulae and re-apply it to all of our raw data so that the old numbers are now correct and moving forward the new ones should be as well.

I don't really understand what you are trying to "demonstrate" with this thread beyond the usual inane ramblings I seem to see more and more of on these forums...

I think he's tying to show the cumulative tracking difference your site has for the ps4. It's a useful tool in the sense that it shows much more undertaking than overtaking. even still the cumulative difference is still less than 10% of the total and very impressive especially with much that from growth the markets harder to track.

 

Though I can see it fueling the never ending cries of under tracked, I think should go further and do for more systems.





DonFerrari on 01 October 2014
mornelithe said:
DonFerrari said:
Yes there are severe mistrack on any week, but the accumulated is quite acceptable. Anyway ioi never said why x360 numbers were adjusted so fast with shipments figure (putting 1M overtracked in germany to top it) that he have to guess how much on shelves and channel but took almost 1 month to adjust ps4 even though they were direct sells numbers without need to guess. And even getting all the details from Sony (I remember he confirming to have received their data) he still kept around 250 undertracked (it was 900k off on a. 7M-10M interval. Tracked 2.1 against 3M that is 40% off, they had adjusted for 7M with may report and in q few months lost track completely... If it was a holiday period the total number difference would be obscene.

I think it's likely that the numbers that Microsoft released to them, iterated the regions where the units were undertracked.  That's just a guess though.  I've no idea why they wouldn't receive the same kind of information from Sony though.


It was based on official  SHIPMENTS figure, not breakdown sales through.and in Sony case it was sales breakthrough that took long to be received but still kept 250k undertracking. And I remember at a time in 2011-2012 Ps3 had between 2-3M difference between official shipped and sold in vgc and several pro ms Said Sony was overstuffing the channel (for almost 2 years I heard that), and took long to correct, but x360 numbers happened fast and seeing next shipments figure we can see overstuffing.



duduspace11 "Well, since we are estimating costs, Pokemon Red/Blue did cost Nintendo about $50m to make back in 1996"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=8808363

Mr Puggsly: "Hehe, I said good profit. You said big profit. Frankly, not losing money is what I meant by good. Don't get hung up on semantics"

http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=9008994

Azzanation: "PS5 wouldn't sold out at launch without scalpers."

starcraft on 01 October 2014
BraLoD said:
starcraft said:
Having had a very quick look through this thread let me say this. There is a big difference in taking an interest in the accuracy of the site, and attacking it.

Utterly stupid conspiracy theories that make zero sense for any reason would be far closer to attacking the site than taking a reasonable interest in its tracking.

I really hope you are not refering to the OP.

It's all based in actual data provided by VGChartz itself, and the considerarions made by me in the end are by no means attacks, it's all about how the tracking went.

I wasn't referring to the OP.



starcraft - Playing Games = FUN, Talking about Games = SERIOUS

Kerotan on 01 October 2014
Arkaign said:
wary-wallaroo said:
Kerotan said:


I don't believe that excuse at all. They gave the 360 over 1 million imaginary numbers in Germany but won't do it for the PS4? It's common knowledge that the PS4 is undertracked on here for ASIA for starters and probably most of the EU. 

 

WHat were the reasons behind VGchartz being banned on neogaf anyway? 


From what I understand (never actually asked since the mere mention of this can get you banned on GAF), but ioi used to have an account there and often posted data that inflated 360 numbers to make it look better. Eventually, the mods got pissed and just banned it, so they banned ioi's new site as well to make sure the numbers didn't come back (VGC).

 

This is why I find the disparity between treatment of Xbox numbers and PS numbers to be somewhat telling. Not qutie a conspiracy theories when it seems we have at least some facts to back up the assertion. 

Fascinating. Do you have links to any of those threads on there?

FWIW I enjoy VGC and do not intend to attack the site, but it is pretty obvious that regardless of intent the PS4 numbers and Xbox numbers are regularly mistracked (not always, but 'often' enough to be a trend) in opposite directions. X1 was overtracked, and PS4 undertracked.

I just bear that in mind and it's useful to form an accurate analysis by contrasting VGC numbers with NPDs.

We're all human, we all have biases whether we admit it or not. I am somewhat ambivalent towards Sony and negative towards Microsoft myself.

I googled a few of the old gaf threads on ioi and it appears the site was banned, not because of arguments he had over there but because of users on the site constantly quoting the innacurate vgchartz numbers and turning every thread into a fanboy war. Don't know if it's true but if that's the case then it's unfortunate for VGchartz. 



Kerotan on 01 October 2014
ioi said:

Then you clearly never read any post I make on this subject.

Playstation sales tend to be strong in markets that don't have great coverage - Eastern Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia, South America - the best we can do in these regions is make broad estimates based on past trends, active populations and data that we collect in the more traditional regions such as the USA, Canada, Western Europe and Japan (which represents over 80% of the total global market).

It really isn't that difficult.


Hey ioi, when won't Sony or Microsoft give you accurate numbers themselves? I'm sure one of them if not both is undertracked so why wouldn't the maker of the undertracked console not want you having the right numbers? 

 

Have you tried contacting  them and if so what did they say?