I'm trying to figure out how many units a few publishers have shipped over the past few years.  I wanted to know if anyone had any comments as to the accuracy of the sales data.

I spoke with Activision, who said they shipped approximately 69 million console games in 2008.  If you run a 2008 World Chart for Activision and Activision / Blizzard, the total is about 46.5m.

I realize that these charts only capture the top 50 games by manufacturer, but at the same time, you'd need a significantly 'long tail' for games ranked #51 on to make up that kind of a gap.

Anyone have any thoughts?  Thanks.

Hope the following points help clear it up for you.

1. ALL manufacturers, publishers, etc track sales TO RETAILERS.
2. This site tracks sales TO CONSUMERS.

That means a publishers shipped figure will always be different than the counts on this site unless its a really old game/console that has theoretically fully sold through retail.

3. Hardware figures on this site are about as perfect as you could expect without literally being able to count each and every sale from every single retailer throughout the world.
4. Software sales for the top 50 games are probably within the 15% accuracy levels.
5. Software sales for the rest are probably within the 40% accuracy levels.

This means that hardware numbers can be taken as is, however, software (especially grand totals as you are doing) should be considered within a range of proximity to truth for games outside of the top 50 or so.

So your 47m to 69m is actually not that bad. For one, 69m was shipped to retailers of ALL games. I would guarantee that there are ~10m sitting worldwide on store shelves and inventories. Then you're only looking at 5-7m (~10%) off for all titles sold in 2008. meh, not a big deal. Sales tracking is not a perfect science. Its always an estimation.

Btw, you know you can also get the financial reports for each of these companies, which will always have the 100% perfect shipped figures.

Thx for the insight. Very helpful.

Also, I didn't see it in superchunks post, but PAL information is by far the biggest area for this discrepancy, as a lot more games there never get tracked at all. For example Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon was never tracked in PAL.