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Forums - Sales - Could NPD be Wrong?

Ulysses on 20 April 2009

The gaming companies always release their sales statements for the month moments after npd releases their numbers, i have never seen them saying anything against npd, thats because they respect npd above all other tracking services.



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The on 20 April 2009

^yeah, what Uly says. If the gaming companies accept NPD data without complaints is because they (the gaming companies) have done their own homework to find out how reliable NPD methods are.



outlawauron on 20 April 2009
MrBubbles said:
well...if they dont get Wal marts numbers and wal mart has seen increases in sales since the economic downturn, its safe to assume that more people have been shopping at walmart rather than other places. which might be able to cause some odd numbers.

They extrapolate to include Walmart's sales are.

I think NPD is the best source, but that aren't perfect.



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Slimebeast on 20 April 2009
NJ5 said:

It's actually pretty easy to prove that NPD's public data isn't completely trustworthy.

They never publish corrections to their past data. This means that either:

1- Their data is always correct the first time (quite unlikely given they don't receive sales data from Walmart and other big retailers)
2- They simply forget about past errors and carry on (adding up several months will result in wrong data, as well as each month's data being sometimes wrong).
3- They adjust for past errors by adjusting later months' data. In this case it's not possible to trust each month's data, since it may be wrong or adjusted up or down to account for past mistakes. At least in this case the sum of several months should be more close to the truth.

Take your pick, since we don't really know what they do. There's no transparency at all with NPD's numbers.

 

Well it's most likely option No 3. Brett believes that too.

It's by far the most logical one. Plus it's supported by the yo-yo phenomenon even an amateur can spot looking at a trend of NPD numbers. I wish someone would do a statistical analysis and it could be easily proved.