I wasn't saying that 17.7 million aren't in homes. But USUALLY, they are speaking about shipped, and they are always vague with the wording so as to intentionally mislead people. But who knows, they may have 17.7 in homes. idk, I don't work for Microsoft.

Well I don't mind one way or another. The true time to see whether VGC is accurate is when the quarterly shipment figures come in from the big three. There they CANNOT lie and their scope for misleading us is limited.

VGC traditionally is quite accurate over the long-term on all three consoles.

@ Starcraft

Yeah, I mean it's apples and oranges.

Being off by 250k [if true] isn't that bad. And who knows, maybe they can find out sold to consumers now.

But it won't be off by 250, it'll be off by 150k cause US numbers haven't come in yet. Off by 150k out of 17.7 million is excellent, especially as we are near the END of a quarter and its been ages since a time period covered by announced shipments.
Well done ioi.

Cheers to ioi for accuracy!

It's amazing that one pro-MS article gets ragged on by Auron and others...I'm getting a little tired of everyone jumping on the "Xbot" train when there aren't any of the sort here....

But I do tend to think that MS is talking actual install base. As said by others, MS can easily figure out their install base.

Users connected on live (as of today) / historical (or most recent confirmed) ratio of XBL users to units sold = instal base.

It's not that hard folks. MS knows exactly how many people, to the tee, of people on XBL. They know how that plays into their actual install base. Is it any wonder they can comment on the install base and *gasp* be right?

Why is this an issue? Its almost spot on for VG front page figures?

One thing though - this would NOT include all the RRoD (or other) broken 360s that might be "plugged in" - but not working ;)

...

MS has a "little" more than money than VG does. I'm sure if they wanted to, they could come up with a pretty good, damned close estimate of consumer sales worldwide.

I'm pretty sure Microsoft receives weekly sales data from NPD for USA and Canada, Media Create for Japan, and GFK for Europe. Most likely they receive corrections for those figures on a regular basis too.

That only leaves a few small markets uncovered (Australia/NZ, other American countries, other Asia, Africa and Middle East), which wouldn't affect figures significantly even if their data is not so good.

Microsoft didn't put aside $1 billion in repair money for nothing. The only consoles that arn't plugged in at the moment and working are the ones going to, at, or coming back from repair centers.

That MAY change a little bit after the 3 yr Rrod warranty runs out, but I expect MS will soon be well below 10% failure rates on new models (in fact there seem to be hardly any reports of recently purchased Xbox 360's crapping out at all).

GFK covers Australia/NZ as well.  They give out free software rankings publically each week, and I imagine they hand software and hardware numbers to the big three each week.