Great site.  I find the resource extremely useful.  One feature that I would love to see is some trending on both the games and the systems.  The one page on the console sale gives me a cumulative look at sales.  It would also be nice to see incremental weekly sales trends for the consoles.

For games it would be great to be able to look at the different curves and atrophy rates for sales over time.

Keep up the good work.

have you tried the "compare consoles" page yet?

The compare consoles page is busted, it only works for the 3 current consoles. I've tried to get stuff to work on it but all i ever get is some orange screen.

Definitely poke around with the compare consoles page, look at some of the graphs and such, and make any suggestions to ioi. He's a busy guy, but he gets to stuff eventually. Trending sales would be interesting. Perhaps some of the people who do data analysis could even look into it.

Edit: Oh yeah, I did see a thread about the compare consoles being busted. Perhaps we should bring this to ioi's attention. 

There are a lot of ways to do trend analysis and they all tend to fail to predict anything that you don't already know. I'd say that the hardware sales are too prone to fluctuation to make any reasonable projections.

Off the top of my head, I can think of a reasonable model for software sales though. You could model weekly sales as something like Ae^(-rt)+Be^(-st) where t is time in weeks since release and the rest are constants. A is a large constant representing initial sales, with r determined by the drop off in subsequent weeks. B is a smaller constant representing sustained sales, with s being determined by the longevity of sales (i.e. the "legs"). It may also be possible to incorporate holiday sales into the model by assuming they're proportional to A and adding something like an Ae^(-qt)*(sin(pi*(t+n)/104))^m term where n is 52 minus the number of weeks between release and the middle of the holiday sales season and where m is some even number that is sufficiently large that this term only has an impact over the appropriate weeks. q would have to be set by guesswork though, but it might be possible to get a reasonable value by setting it equal to r times some fudge factor determined by comparing release and holiday sales for past titles.

Ignoring all of my holiday guesswork, we could fit sales data to this curve by using least squares to get a best fit for s based the sales from week x on, where x is whatever week can be considered the cutoff between release sales and sustained sales. Then we would set B equal to the sales in week x divided by e^(-sx). Then A would be the release week sales minus B, and we'd set r by least squares. After gathering enough data, this could be used to create a projection for lifetime sales for a game.

Of course this is all pretty naive, but lots of big businesses use naive trend models all the time, so if all of the popular kids are doing it, I'm in.