Remeber NPD extrapolates for about 40% of the market so to say that they are perfectly accurate is false, they are just accepted as being accurate

ioi said: Just_Ben, if NPD are blocking everyone from using their figures that will include SimExchange. I still find it a really interesting thing to do, what are they hoping to achieve?

 SimExchange has a contract with NPD hardware and 10 Software titles per month, or do you think they get the numbers for the software not in the Top 10 for free?

I think it's bad for everyone interested in sales data , including VGChartz. Ofcourse there might be a surge in members , but without being able to tell the difference to a renownend market-researching institute like the NPD ,numbers over here will lose credibility and weight , because as a "newcomer" VGChartz has to prove themselves every month ,while the NPD is perceived as "accurate" (and well with their huge resources and those prices they charge for their data ,they better are).

ioi said: I still find it a really interesting thing to do, what are they hoping to achieve?

 If you do it quarterly you can adjust the figures shortly after the shipment data gets in? Don't know, you should have the NPD numbers of last quarter of US+CA in a list. Did you ever add them together and compared them to the shipped reported? Has NPD somewhere more sold than shipped, are there unreasonable things? I always wanted to do such a comparsion but I would have to search for all NPD data in the Web for every month, and to be honest, I'm a little to lazy to do that. But I figure you can read the accuraccy of NPD out of it.

Sqrl said: Honestly I think its fair to say NPD was instructive in the early stages of the site for helping ioi refine his process but my take on what has been going on with the numbers as of late is that ioi has refined it down to a point where I don't think you can really say one is more accurate than the other. They are both estimates and within a fairly small margin and at that point its anyone's guess as to who is closer to 100% accurate. But the good thing is that its also close enough for folks like us not to worry about it and quarterly reports will always be around and are considered hard numbers which are far more important than just another set of soft numbers. edit: PS - woohoo I crossed 2k posts!

So NPD will start releasing quarterly numbers only? That makes it kind of pointless, that's when the hardware companies release their shipped numbers anyway...

This is great news for vgchartz, but of course not such good news for everyone else. Less information is less information, period.

PS: I wonder if the existence of vgchartz caused or affected this decision.

 

Well ioi, they may not do the blog, but the data is open for everyone with an account, they have to cash out your shares at a price. If they wouldn't get the data in the future, they would have been noticed. They don't have access to all NPD data. I don't know about hardware, but they have an agreement on 10 software titles per month. Thats why there are always 10 software futures per month. If it would have been canceled, SE wouldn't put out January futures.

The SE system requires the data to be public, at least to the people assigned. You just would go to you history and how the cash out was.

Do you want to share the things with the Wii and the DS with us? I mean the data of the NPD is public, how far are they off the shipments?

ioi said: Just_Ben, if NPD are blocking everyone from using their figures that will include SimExchange. I still find it a really interesting thing to do, what are they hoping to achieve?

I actually think it was inevitiable.

The closer VGChartz got to "official" NPD figures, the more irrelevant NPD became - and the less chance they had that someone would "pay" for identical figures.

By pulling public figures, it makes it harder for any site  to end up with similar numbers. And there isn't this whole public comparison of both sets of figures.

Can you imagine what would happen to NPD, if any of the platform holders released figures - which were closer to say VGChartz, than NPD? Their reputation would be completely shot.

...

Being invisible, its much easier for them to perpetuate the thinking that NPD is "perfectly" accurate (they are still accepted as "the numbers" by the majority of the public - no one even considers that they could be wrong).

I think this is bad news for anyone interested in sales data .NPD has a way bigger sample than anyone else and their data has been useful to adjust the numbers of the site .For example last month both the PS3 and DS had been overtracked and were being overtracked every week and NPD data showed that .I fear this will turn into a "Others " case with the numbers being adjusted by 500K every quarter ...and if they arent we cant even confirm if its because they are correct or because vgchartz simply stands to those .

ioi said: Well I fear that the futures part of SE may be short-lived. The data is there for all to see, DS shipments to North America during July - September were about 50-60% higher than the amount NPD said were sold. Of course we have stockpiling for christmas etc but you get a similar situation with Wii which is in a perpetual state of sellout. Compare to Japan and shipment figures are very close to Media Create / Famitsu - suggesting to me that they are doing a far better job than NPD.

If you say so, I don't need to look, do I? Well maybe if I wanna bash NPD a little. I will look if I have time for that, but I don't believe so. First of, I will do that little favour for TheSource. Needed some day of programming the last couple days, but I'm back now :o) Well maybe I'll help MrStickball a little. Actually you will get a Email most likley today from me with some question. But thats nothing to discuss in public :o)

 

Diomedes1976 said: I think this is bad news for anyone interested in sales data .NPD has a way bigger sample than anyone else and their data has been useful to adjust the numbers of the site .For example last month both the PS3 and DS had been overtracked and were being overtracked every week and NPD data showed that .I fear this will turn into a "Others " case with the numbers being adjusted by 500K every quarter ...and if they arent we cant even confirm if its because they are correct or because vgchartz simply stands to those .

you didn't read the post above yours, did ya?