not exactly,
because nobody knows exactly how many are in homes.

We have our estimates and they have theirs.
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't give two shits about estimates, because their "sold", is "sold to retailers". So, those units are sold, but they haven't been sold to consumers. They've made their money already, those units are sold to retailers, retailers being MS' customers. Whatever the retailers do with them is not their concern I'm sure.

Ahhh....so MS and vgc have the same method of knowing how much 360's(A MS product) are in the consumers hands....estimating......good thinking prof.

I'm trying to tell you that in the OP, MS is talking about "sold to retailers". They do not care to spend money estimating numbers that mean nothing to them.

Here is the thread when I found out there were like 1.3M or so PS3s on the shelves and I refused to believe it. What you are saying is nothing new. lol Although I was being far more polite than "magic" is.

But, as per your recent point above, 1M of those 360s are probably in distributor warehouses, and 400k are on shelves.

The point about the fire was merely to illustrate that MS does not know or even care to know about what happens to one of those consoles once it's in a store.

Edit:

forgot the link lol

http://www.vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=47044

MS does know how many consoles they have sold to customer better than ANY other tracking service. Every research service like NPD, Media Create, GFK or VGC estimates some part of the market, MS has MUCH more data available than any other service. So if they estimate their Xbox 360 sold to customer sales, it is more accurate than anything else.

They do not know it 100%, but still better than independent tracking services.

@Source

I unterstand your 33.5 million number, but why does MS say 34 million + ? There has to be a mistake somewhere.

I assume you didn't see my post cuz it's on the second page coolbeans, it's at the top.

Also, VGC also estimates how many consoles are shipped. This year, compared to the OP, VGC was like 99.9% accurate.

DirtyP
I'd like a link to prove that what you said is not opinion.

a link to prove what? That MS knows how much consoles they sold to retail? Or that VGC doesn't cover the whole market and works with estimates?

For example: Walmart does not talk about their sales at all. Nobody knows how many consoles have been sold there. But MS is the only one that knows how much consoles they sold to Walmart. So their estimates are more accurate than other estimates, because other research services do not have any data for Walmart.

Exactly. They only know how much they've sold to walmart. You just said previously that MS knows better than everone else how many consoles are sold to customers, and then you say MS tracks sales to walmart. I'll agree with you more on the second part. All they know is how much they've sold to any retailer, unless they waste money paying NPD to tell them, or they waste money figuring it out themselves.

Anyway, VGC doesn't track retailer data to my knowledge. They use a different method of gathering data. NPD tracks retailer data.

Yeah man, you can see in that other thread that I was really confused at first as well, and it took many people to finally convince me.

You didn't have to make them look THAT bad