WHAT?????

It sold 250k first week on the PS4 in the U S of A alone. And that's first week. You honestly can't paint it's sales in a bad light because honestly they're excellent. It only had a digital release in the EU because of a disc malfuntion or something and that will arrive in 2 or 3 weeks. Add in the rest of the world and the coming first week EU launch and you're looking at it selling over 500k week one including digital on the PS4 alone. Not bad for a new IP in the crowded zombie market. 

Actually it does. If the release date isn't updated in the database - which is the actual error here - and the data sample does not have that game among confirmed sales the algorithm will still estimate sales that the data base tells the algorithm it is on the market. This does nothing to prove the sales estimate system is broken or unreliable. But it does seriously call into question the reliability of the game database management.

If you know how statistical modelling works you'd have understood these things, so whatever you do with the market research business it seems statistical modelling isn't it. Is it bad that vgc has recorded sales for a game that isn't out yet? Yes it's bad. But not for the reasons you are suggesting.

The point I'm making is that it's based off no real world data whatsoever (referring to actual DW8:Empires sales). 

What were to happen if the game database did update? Would we have the same number but just it comes out next month? It throws VGChartz entire premise out the window. You can't "track" a product that hasn' been released but it seems VGChartz already has algorithms in place to create numbers out of thin air. 

Anyone claiming VGChartz is a reliable tracker is wrong. It's a bunch of childs guesses. 

Nice catch there. 

It happened twice in May 2014. First they tracked sales of Spiderman (XOne) even though the game was delayed for two weeks.

Then they tracked Borderlands 2 for Vita much higher than Vita sales, even though it was impossible to buy a game standalone, it was only available in a bundle. Yet they showed about 50,000 units difference.

Until then, I had taken VGC numbers more seriously, but after that I consider them all just a guess. They have since overtracked PS4 software sales by more than 10 million units, and not a single month has passed that they haven't been forced to reevaluate their numbers in light of official reports. 

Sometimes they guess better than other times, but that is all it is - a guess. And shouod be used only as a material for discussion between official announcements.

of course they are. after the official trackers give their numbers they are always ajusted to match them pretty closely. vgchartz is a great source of info after adjustments have been made. 

Those wii u numbers are terrible. In the UK there has been serious discounting of stock and yet those numbers are awful. It seems the wii u has had some serious non official price drops to maintain similar numbers to last year if the same is happening in other markets.

PS3 deserves to sell more, far superior range of software, blu-ray movie playback and the brilliant value of psn plus. The console itself in many ways is more powerful than wii u. The cpu is probably 4x as powerful and there is more memory bandwidth in the memory chips themselves. It also benefits from a fast sata hard drive to stream data at high speed in addition to its optical drive. Add to that full support for surround with 7.1 soundtracks in games etc plus a decent controller. Yes the wii u has a superior gpu, more memory and that 32MB of fast embedded memory but the ps3 is still very competitive in hardware and where games exist on both consoles they are generally better on ps3 than wii u. I say that as a wii u owner with both connected to a projector. It's clear to see the ps3 outperforms the wii u most of the time. Nintendo really set the bar low this generation.

It's hard to recommend the wii u with its limited software library and weak performance. I honestly see this year as a decline year for wii u unless NIntendo can do something. A real shame.

You're really showing a lack of understanding here. If vgc gets actual game sales data from 20 retail locations in the country and none of those locations record a single sale for, let's say, sunset Overdrive does that mean vgc should record SO sales for that week as zero? Of course not, because there are thousands of retail stores in the country and some of them will have sold SO. The algorithm uses various statistical techniques to estimate game sales for thousands of games for which no direct sales data is available. That's not child's guesses, it's actually sophisticated statistical processing. The basis of your complaint is groundless because you're aiming your critique at the wrong flaw in the system. The flaw in the system is that the game database scheduled the release date for this game wrongly and thus the algorithm picked up that game as requiring a sales estimate. The algorithm relies on the database having a correct launch date to trigger when sales estimates should start. If you get the input information wrong then the information coming out is bad. The QA on base game metadata is at fault here, not the algorithm used to create sales estimates. 

The fact is no one is under any illusion that game sales numbers are at all accurate. There are too many games and not a big enough sampling plan to yield highly reliable figures. But getting the launch date of a game wrong and thus creating an obvoliously incorrect sales number for it proves nothing about the accuracy of the system to estimate sales.

So X1 absolutely outselling the PS4 in the US might not be absolute after all.

after NPD it should be pretty clear that PS4 will outsell it unil November just like last year

This