Machina said:
Link and page reference please. |
The games in the 'Top 10' (or 9 in Wii's case) are the easiest to verify, on this page, going beyond those is a more difficult search. Not all of them apply, but to take a few of those games for example;
Wii Play has sold 28.96m according to VGC, yet shipped 28.02m on Nintendo's page. You can look further through the more detailed reports here. When scrolling back far enough Wii Play's last mentioned with a shipment number of 27.38m in 2009 (page 5, here), which means it never shipped more than a million in any quarter or full year after that (they mention everything that shipped more than a million during the time-frame a specific report encompasses). Since we're still missing a cool 700k to get to Nintendo's final number, we could look for it on the same page using the Waybackmachine (put the url of the Nintendo site in there, it seems I can't link directly from these forums) to look at later dates, though sadly it doesn't go back further than april 2012 for this page. I guess Nintendo put their numbers someplace else before then, but until now I haven't found it yet. In any case, even as late in april 2012, the number for Wii Play was already 28.02 (I guess it stands to reason that the final 700k was shipped in 2010, the year after the final mention in 2009). At the end of the day, the game couldn't have sold more than the 28.02 it already shipped before 2012, while VGC has it crossing that number in 2010, while having it at 28.9m on september 30th of 2015.
So in this case it was likely tracking quite well actually, but should just have stopped at some point.
Then there's Wii Fit which got it's last shipment update in 2012, which the number here is ahead of (just slightly though, which probably means it was too low for quite some time). Old games do get updated as they get new shipments, because they still update Wii Sports/Resort and Mario Kart and others to this day, and they have always been consistent between those top 10 pages and the official reports when they're mentioned in both. There's also a thread on Gaf where people compiled all the shipment data from apparently all those IR reports, though obviously I personally didn't verify all that. I take it the algorithms for the sales don't know when certain games stop getting shipments, and at one point go on to count too far.
Anyway, I do admit I was a bit colorful in that post, it isn't that dramatic and Wii Play is by far the worst offender on the Wii and I don't know about Lego City, but there's more like this on the DS however. At a glance the Pokémon games, Animal Crossing and the Brain Trainings have been counted past their expiration dates.
Lastly, to shoehorn this in again since we're on the subject: Similarly, Sony never shipped past 102.49m of the original PlayStation as evidenced here: http://scei.co.jp/corporate/data/bizdataps_e.html (also as seen in the Waybackmachine), so who made and sold VGC's extra ~2m of this console? 
