http://kotaku.com/5327502/lifetime-sales-figures-for-the-playstation-3

At the beginning of August, before the PS3 Slim was announced, Sony revealed they had *sold* 23.8 million PS3s. Whether you'd like to argue its shipped to retailers or sold to consumers, it doesnt matter.

This was a month ago, since then we had heard of Phat shortages leading up to the official launch of the PS3 slim. So even if you take Sony's official figure as shipped I find it extremely hard to believe that there are 500,000 PS3 phats sitting on shelves around the world like VGChartz claims.

I find it troubling that a site dedicated to tracking sales can ignore information like this.

No I dont expect VGChartz to change its numbers to match company releases like this, atleast go back and check your data. It seems pretty clear that VGChartz is off by atleast a a few hundred thousand.

Anyone with a reasonable explanation?

There this discrepancy within all data, if you take VGchartz as anything more than just estimation you're caring way too much.

I understand, and I have often recommended that other people use it as an estimation.

I simply dont understand why they ignore information like this, despite it being able to make there estimation more accurate.

If they're off they're off by just a few percent, so it's really not a huge deal. And obviously if ioi feels like its a big enough deal it will e adjusted eventually.

I keep seeing this figure of 23.8 million come up in several threads. I also keep seeing people respond to such threads that there was a mistake in the 23.8 million figure.

Guess we will have to wait for one of those posts to show up.

Yes, having 500k units on store shelves, warehouses and in shipments is a reasonable number.

Not to mention that PS3 still manages to sell 40k a week in America and Others despite "being completely sold out"

I don't know where these "phat" shortages were that you're talking about. You can still find them all over the place.

the walmart near me ran out of phats :/

See, this doesn't include Sony's warehouses. Whether or not the store is keeping them in warehouses is an entirely different matter.