Nice. Great to see hardware numbers for Europe weekly. I assume it will be a while for the software numbers. Great Job.

He gets his data" Direct from retailers all over the world". Love it or leave it. They are estimates. 

Sharky..I think there are a number of ways to get information.

1) Console and publisher shipment information

2) GFK, NPD, MC, and the rest all rely on retailers assembling data for the week so that the agencies can extrapolate it.  ioi uses the agencies as reference points, but primarily gets the data from whatever assembled retailer information he can get his hands on.

3) Regression formulas.  Yeah, there probably are some complex algorithms involved in assembling the data.  I would think once a game stops selling at a certain level, it is just entered into the algorithm to determine how fast sales will regress to zero new units being sold at retail.  If you are only covering 2% retail for instance, and the game sold only 5,000 copies this week, it is entirely possible none of your covered stores have the information, which would mean you need the formula to estimate the nuances of small scale national sales.

4) Historical trends & current trends.  Big games are actually easy to predict, and small games are the ones likely to be off but since no one (except for small communities) really cares about them, it is somewhat irrelevant to publishers and viewers if the sales of those games are off by 5% or 100% since sales are so small (talking games well under 100,000 worldwide).  Medium/Typical hits (100,000-300,000) worldwide are the most difficult to predict I think, since they are so common and so variable...

Does that help?

 Yes but he's doing one of two things imo: GFK source, or retrofitting to past shipment/articles sales numbers.

The former would be much more meaningful. 

I've defended ioi's numbers a lot on other forums. I believe he for example, does have some American retail sources, and as such I have high hopes his weekly American numbers will turn into a nice NPD predicting tool.. However, in this case I think European numbers broken down weekly by country, are getting pretty dicey and "made up" without some further transparency.. 

Leave it to The Source to break it down with possibilities. Nice Analysis, as always.

This is awesome, but it would be great to have a "Total Other" option on the graph-machine that matches the "Others" on the front page.

and xbox 360 gets nerfed by 30k again while the wii gets another bonus.... just don't want the 360 to hit 10 million....

I respect that you are defending VGCharts, sharky, but it seems a fruitless venture. Those who ridicule the weekly numbers have no interest whether the numbers are real or not. It seems more a slander job due to whatever past ioi may share with them. If you question the validity of this data, you can always PM ioi, and maybe he'll provide you some information to pacify you.

By the way, very interesting to see the breakdown for Europe numbers. I love the direction this site is taking. 

Yeah, don't get me wrong, I love having the breakdown available. I'd just also like the option of seeing it as a conglomerate. :)

Suggestion for Pie Chart Colours, associate a particular colour to each console (the same colour as their chart name icon) to save for confusion, it's okay for the US and Japan (although sometimes software and hardware colours are different) but in Europe it's hella confusing when you look from one chart to the next and have to associate your eyes to the legend every time...