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Forums - Sales Discussion - Holy Hell hardware adjustments!

Kasz216 on 31 January 2010
drkohler said:
Kasz216 said:
ultraslick said:
..

I always have enjoyed VGC, but now I simply love it for what it is, instead of what it never was.

They are down to the last number because that's how formulas work.  They could round by the thousands... but why? 

Because "rounding by the thousand" is the correct statistical way of presenting such estimated numbers. It is completely irrelevant how "the formula works". If you have access to a statistics bureau/university teacher, they can explain it to you. All this circles around is presenting data with an accuracy that does not exist 8as we have just witnessed).

@ultraslick Exactly my thoughts.

It's not the "correct" way to present the data.  It's the eaisest way to present the data to cut out a bunch of extra numbers.  No more.

I graduated with a degree that involved 3 statistics classes thanks.

Doing so can lead to all kinds of errors.  It's really not the best way to do it for compiling numbers.

 

The raw numbers tell you much much more and are more important for just about anything except having 1 pretty number to look at.

 

Espiecally when your adding up sales weekly and monthly.  Games go on for MONTHS selling just a few thousand... rounding their MAY even out, or it may not.  Seems stupid to leave something to chance when it's a moving dataset.

 

You think NPD has nothing but rounded by thousand numbers in their database?  I'd bet not.



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Metallicube on 31 January 2010

People upset with the adjustments, if PS3 was adjusted up rather than down, would you guys be bitching and moaning? Ponder that one. My guess is no most of you would not, you would be celebrating.

I mean should adjustments like these really be a surprise? This is a FREE tracking site that uses VERY tough to pin down European numbers. If the inaccuracy of the European numbers bothers you so much, just omit or ignore them.

You should know what your getting when you go to this site, and that is ESTIMATES, based on a SAMPLE of data. Did anyone ever think the numbers posted before they were adjusted were 100% accurate, or even close? At least they are making an effort to correct them and make them more accurate.



Kynes on 31 January 2010
Metallicube said:

People upset with the adjustments, if PS3 was adjusted up rather than down, would you guys be bitching and moaning? Ponder that one. My guess is no most of you would not, you would be celebrating...

Here is the problem. A lot of people are upset because they use the numbers in their internet warz, and all that is important to them is that the PS3 sales > 360 sales and/or HD consoles sales > Wii sales. Almost no one bitched this way when Wii got it's adjustment (as big as this one or bigger) in 2009. It seemed reasonable then, why not now?

Bunch of hypocrites.



nordlead on 31 January 2010
Scruff7 said:
I don't think people are frustrated/angry/disappointed that the figures have been adjusted, we all know that this is a sales estimate and prediction website, so adjustments are always going to happen.

I do think people are frustrated/angry/disappointed that they weren't given an explanation, just apparent changes.

After putting their heart and soul into the website, and i dare say defending it from attacks on other websites, an explanation or a little heads up is small thing to ask for for the loyal community that has formed here.

actually, there was an explanation (and fairly quickly) and it got copied to multiple pages.




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burgerstein on 31 January 2010

Maybe ioi's explanation should be pasted into the OP. Then we'd get a little more peace around here.



"Now, a fun game should always be easy to understand - you should be able to take one look at it and know what you have to do straight away. It should be so well constructed that you can tell at a glance what your goal is and, even if you don’t succeed, you’ll blame yourself rather than the game. Moreover, the people standing around watching the game have also got to be able to enjoy it." - Shiggy

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numonex on 31 January 2010

Excellent thread. The responses in this thread were amazing. So passionate are the fanboys on this site. Defend your console system like it is your own life.



Fab_GS on 31 January 2010
ioi said:
I believe there was an explanation on the first page, seems some people can't read.

For some futher insight. For the "Others" region we get direct data for the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Australia. That's it. For the likes of Finland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Austalia, Belgium, Netherlands we do not get direct weekly sell-through data and many of those regions don't even have an official tracking body (such as GFK). So most people don't know a huge amount about these regions.

What we do is model the sales in the regions we don't get data for via the regions we do. So if PS3 slim causes a 300% increase in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy then we assume it sees the same across the rest of Europe. If 7.5% of PS3 sales in 2009 were from Scandinavia and 6.8% in 2008 and 7.1% in 2007 then we model at 7.13% for 2010. We don't have the raw data to directly estimate sales in every region, some have to be modelled based on the data we do have. Nobody is tracking data in South Africa but its 0.1% marketshare gets lumped in with all of the other regions in "other others".

The emerging markets are almost impossible to track, as are the smaller regions in Europe. Luckily they only represent small percentages of overall sales - UK+France+Germany+Spain+Italy covers a good 75% of total European sales so it is more than reasonable in to use this data to cover the remaining 25%.

When data gets released into the public like Nintendo's "pan-European estimated based on local tracking services" then they are using the data from ChartTrack, GFK etc in as many regions as they can get, plus doing what we do essentially and extrapolating for markets not covered directly. Since their estimates for Scandinavian and Benelux / Austria / Switzerland were looking around 15-20% lower across the board than VGChartz estimates, and given 3rd party research like can be found here - http://vgchartz.com/forum/thread.php?id=99254&page=1 - then we made adjustments to our estimates and models for these regions, across the board.

The same may be true for "other others" when some good quality 3rd party data gets released for Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Russia, India etc. Currently, just like for Scandianvia and Other Europe, weekly sales for those regions are extrapolations of the data we do get, using info from Gamercard analysis (what proportion of people with gamercard profiles come from each region), PSN analysis, Nintendo Channel analysis along with public reports and overall market size estimates - one project we undertook last year was to produce an overview of the 2009 market for clients based on all public data and split by region, so we have a good grasp of how large each region is, but obviously that is a dynamic thing and will change from year to year. We assume that the Asian markets are picking up marketshare and have modelled rates for each platform but until we have hard data to correlate that with, then the models and estimates may not be totally correct.

This is a dynamic site, with constantly changing markets, many of which are hard to track directly. There will be adjustments from time to time - the only way to avoid this is to turn VGChartz into a full-on worldwide tracking service. This would likely cost a few million dollars a year to fund so either you need to be prepared to start paying extremely large subscriptions to see the data you want to see (which isn't how we're doing things, in fact the standard membership model I discussed previously isn't going to be happening) or just take our data for what it is and understand that while it will not be 100% perfect, it is normally in the right ballpark.


Thanks for taking the time to explain, Brett. Really appreciated.
I suggest editing the OP and editing the thread title, so people would stop whining.



steverhcp02 on 31 January 2010

People need to stop flaiming posters for being upset because everyone will react differently for different adjustments.

The most important thing is that if Brett, who knows a fuckton more than 99% of any of us here, feels this adjustment is necessary and hes changing his model and sticks to it, we can all take a deep breath and from here on out maybe get better numbers.

The tracking evolves, and if Brett feels its evolving in a more accurate way then we all move on and thats that.




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jonop on 31 January 2010

Don't know if that will make people happier or more annoyed lol.



Kynes on 31 January 2010

If it's upwards, people will be happy if their console of preference "wins"