anonymous said: I'm not trying to cast any doubt on VgChartz methods I'm just curious about the PS3 numbers which seem strikingly low. If it has in fact sold under four million at this point does it have any chance of breaking ten million by year's end? Can someone lend some context to this and tell us roughly how many 360's Microsoft had sold at this time? I understand the the holiday season is approaching, and that Sony is bound to sell many PS3's at that time, but it seems like a stretch to predict six or more million being sold over the holidays.
I'm just surprised. I don't follow Sony's numbers, but I had assumed it was doing much better than this. |
There are external sources that effectively back VGChartz' numbers in Japan, America, and to a lesser extent, Europe.
The NPD releases industry-standard figures every month. Last month, the PS3 was outsold by the Wii 4:1 in America. Famitsu and Media Create, two Japanese firms, release Japanese data weekly. They have the Wii outselling the PS3 at approximately a 6:1 or even 7:1 clip over the last month. That ratio has been increasing, by the way: it was 6:1 in June, 5:1 in May, 4:1 in April.
Europe is the hardest to track, but there are some strong signs that VGChartz is quite on the money. For example, Sony announced that they had sold through 1 million PS3s in Europe when VGChartz' tracker read .97 million.
When NPD, Media Create, or any other professional tracking firm has diverges from VGChartz' figures, Ioi (the site administrator) clearly tweaks his numbers to accomodate for this (for example, he tweaked the figures last week when the Canadian NPD totals came out).