nordlead said:
Kotaku screwed that up and got it wrong. Sony didn't change to tracking through to consumers, they changed to tracking sold to retailers (or sony's consumer) Back before 2006 Sony used to report in their financial statements how many units they had produced and stuck in a warehouse. In 2006 they changed to sold, which is how Microsoft and Nintendo report in their financial statements. When a corporation reports sales in a financial statement they must report sales to retailers (or whoever directly purchases from them). The reason for this is that financial statements must be fact, and not estimates, like NPD or VGChartz numbers. The change in method also caused a lot of confusion on the lifetime PS2 numbers. By switching from produced to sold they double counted every unit sitting in a warehouse when they made the switch. So if you add up all the financial statements you actually come up with a number larger than the actual number of units produced. This is why there were large arguments over the PS2 selling 140m units which was also a slipup by whoever said it. The latest figure I've heard from Sony on the PS2 is 138m units and this is over a year after the whole 140m units debate. |
Ahh, thank you. That was the kind of response I was waiting for. The article Kotaku and a lot of other sites reported on started a lot of confusion on a lot of other sites that goes on for pages and pages with no real answer. That actually clears a lot up.
@king_of_the_castle
I don't think they do either. When reading around a few people mentioned that but it didn't really make sense to me for M.S. to do so. Thank you for your input.
