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Gamasutra article on vgchartz
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RancidLunchmeat
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Nothing new there.
Only further evidence that the Mainstream Media is lazy and shouldn't be trusted.
Let VGAChartz do what they want.
But the idea that Forbes, Fortune and the NY Post used them as sources of fact should have not only the authors of the articles fired, but the editors responsible as well.
Only further evidence that the Mainstream Media is lazy and shouldn't be trusted.
Let VGAChartz do what they want.
But the idea that Forbes, Fortune and the NY Post used them as sources of fact should have not only the authors of the articles fired, but the editors responsible as well.
Nice to see it spelled out clearly, and word should spread to the Internet in general, and all those gaming forums. Of particular relevance...
The other surprising thing is why no-one is providing a sales figures service in Europe?! Companies would benefit greatly from seeing how titles, especially regional titles, perform. The market here is near the NA market at the moment, with potential to double it or so. If I were looking to create a game, I'd want figures on real title performance pan-Europe.
Europe is an unknown, and remains and unknown. VGChartz is bound to have got more traffic by offering 'insight' into this difficult market, but it's no more relevant than any of us posting up guesses, based on what we feel places are buying.
The other surprising thing is why no-one is providing a sales figures service in Europe?! Companies would benefit greatly from seeing how titles, especially regional titles, perform. The market here is near the NA market at the moment, with potential to double it or so. If I were looking to create a game, I'd want figures on real title performance pan-Europe.
In general (not saying whether any of these are happening in the gaming industry)...
It is an expensive and sometimes labor intensive process to get timely, sufficient and accurate data across multiple parties on such a large scale. Part of it is related to incentives. Some of the arguments here are: Why should the distis and resellers do extra work to provide the info when the manufacturers have the source in their own ERP systems ? What are you going to do with my customer data ? Will you show these to my competitors ? Europe and Asia are very touchy in this respect.
In addition, the granularity of data is also important (for accurate measurement). Events like backlogged, in-transit, RMA may affect the final calculation quite a fair bit. So the data needs to reflect them on a timely basis. Much of the current worldwide logistic infrastructure may not be sophisticated enough to do these automatically/cheaply (The intermediaries will try/have to nickel and dime the manufacturer to to cover additional overhead during the collection process, so overall it is more expensive than needed). When done manually, I have seen cases where the distis need to hire 1 or 2 clerks exclusively just to collect and consolidate channel data (of assorted formats). This is extra and unwanted cost.
The different channel policies/practices and existing legacy systems also complicate matters. I remember there were issues like not enough funding to upgrade systems, don't want to touch legacy systems, this is not how we do things here, etc.
We are essentially dealing with people and business issues. The IT systems poise some problems but they are usually more manageable.
Finally, the manufacturers are usually unwilling to fork out large sum of money to fix this generic information gathering problem (because it's tedious and not high profile or high value add; ROI is hard to calculate). Instead, they focus on the high level sexy business applications (e.g., CRM, RMA, ERP) which have higher ROI, but may result in piecemeal collection of different data... which pissed off the distis more since they have to submit data in a fragmented way, making the generic problem of data collection even more difficult.
* * *
Finally finally, the dirty secret is: Once these channel data is surfaced and measured. Some channel tricks (Various form of channel stuffing, parallel imports, smuggling) may be identifiable. The distis may lose some "cheating" revenue. The high level execs cannot pull a fast one to boost their sales last minute anymore. So it is more beneficial for them to ignore this problem. When push comes to shoves, I have seen some major distis employ a separate team of data reporters who fake data to submit to the manufacturers, defeating the system entirely.
Finally finally finally, there are other potentially cheaper ways to solve "point needs" (e.g., do a separate consumer survey) without exposing everyone.
Bottomline is it may take eons for anyone to solve this problem.
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well there are occasional pieces of info eg
http://www.mondoxbox.com/news/12528/vendite-hardware-in-italia-per-il-mese-di-maggio-08.html
but yes nothing on a regular basis, like NPD+japan, japan is a shining light, 2 different tracking companies + they both release there data every week.
Personally im surprised we dont see leaks of the european data more often
Dominik D
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Gfk provides numbers for ~8 largest markets in EU outside of UK (and some places outside of EU as well) and ChartTrack provides numbers for UK. The only thing is that they are not public - you have to pay for them.
Correct.
Also, in a way Europe's buying habits are more well documented than the USA, in that you get weekly public software sales charts (top ten/twenty) for every major EU market.
Of course it's not the hardware we'd like to see, but I suppose being weekly, and often in some cases down to top tens by platform etc, a case can be made it's more info than USA gets. It's just not any hard numbers...
GAF has a recurring weekly EU sales charts post if you want to look at that type of info.
But I guess in the sense that you dont typically get any kind of EU hardware (or software) numbers as a whole via a public announcement like NPD, it does suck. As has been pointed out, the best you see is the occasional sales factoid for a particular EU nation in a reputable paper or other news outlet, or manufacture PR, etc. You will see these typically posted at GAF or VGChartz forums when they come to light.
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