There's a term in statistics called the confidence interval. It is a range where the actual number has a certain probability of being in that interval. Usually, statiticians and scientists use the 95% confidence interval. So there is a 95% chance that the actual number falls within the interval. So when Sony says PS4 sales are over 20.2 million, it means that the lower bound of the confidence interval is above 20.2 million sales.

You can, no mod has  locked the thread. Most people are saying in some form. You show a lack of understanding of both basic statistics and English. Yet you continue to post all the time as if what say is fact (you post a lot). With that in mind it is not surprising you annoy people.

When vgc corrected the numbers this was already posted and is due to correction on 2014 period.

It's overtracked by about 20M.

He's Italian, what's your excuse? I feel like insulting the English writing skills of people who's first language is something other than English is bordering on a bannable offence.

OT. Every console is either under or over tracked, the chances of VGC being 100% accurate is pretty much nil, especially since Sony themselves can only estimate the global number of sales to consumers. No one can ever know the exact number of consoles sold to consumers.

So that being said, it's about what is a reasonable level of accuracy for an estimate. LTD estimate of exactly 20.34M vs Sony's estimate of "over 20.2M" is reasonable. General rule of thumb with companies announcing "over X number of sales" is that they are confident of their accuracy to the lowest decimal in the announcement. Which means Sony's estimate is that there were 20.2XYZAB sales LTD. 

Typically if X=9 a company will say "almost 20.3M sales'. But it could be the case that SOny might always want to establish the floor for it's LTD announcements and will always round down with those announcements even if XY=99. We don't know how SOny is approaching it's LTD announcements exepct that the always say "Over XX.X million" these days. So we know  their estikmate is less than 20.3M. 

The maximum inaccuracy here for VGC is 0.69%. But we know the inaccuracy will be less than that because Sony estimates over 20.2M. For statistical purposes, a LTD margin for error of 2-3% is reasonable. So VGC managing to get it's LTD estimate fixed up to be well within 1% of Sony's LTD estimate pretty much means this is the most nitpicky of nitpicky threads when it comes to criticising VGCs numbers.

I know he is Italian. For one, I barely post about sales because I think most of it is speculation not worth thinking too hard about. Most of my posts are gaming opinions and sports opinions not structered to sound like fact. In fact, much of them are purposely written to be carefree and laidback. I am not trying to always make the place a serious ordeal. You however, chose to write every post like it is for an analytical writing course with no personality. I am okay with your choice to take the sales topic very seriously.

And your excuse to be pedantic about that guys english must of course encopass your fluency in Italian, right? Or you just like to be mean to people that don't have english as their native language and while at that make mistakes yourself?

I said he does not know basic statistics and secondly his lack of English understanding was annoying when he presents his ideas as facts all the time. Also, if you read other comments in the thread others also question his knowledge of simple stats and his ability to write about it. Acting like I only complained about his English is ignoring the rest of what I wrote.

Nobody is stopping you,  you do however need more than just a desire for revenge to back it up. 

Other people making ridicolous threads doesn´t mean this one makes more sense. I actually think this thread would have a more fruitful discussion if the premise had been a talk about how we look at numbers and the endless discussion about overtrack/undertrack. Is a less than 1% margin of error enough to even mention the word "overtracked" for example?