VGcharts, like all other sites having a "next-gen war" are using guesstimates that they balance out vs NPD and Media-Create numbers.
No sites like that are to be trusted, especially their european figure.
Media create for japanMedia release figures for the US?
Read on vg charts how they ended making weekly quesses. It is hilarious
80k/week for 360 is extremely strong if true, especially for April, I don't really buy it, it seems unrealistic when there are no major game releases lately.
the amount of data we are collecting is still very small (around a couple of percent of the whole market)
Giving sales numbers when you admit tracking only 2 % of the market is very funny in my book; Not in your ?
Giving sales numbers when you admit tracking only 2 % of the market is very funny in my book; Not in your ?
Well, monthly total consoles moved in the US is around 700-900K so that means that VG would track the sales of around 14,000-18,000 consoles. I don't know the typical sample taken by the average tracking sales site or how accurate they are so it would be hard to determine if that 2% is too low of a number to be reliable.
it depends on how they get their numbers. If these 14-18.000 tracked consoles are all from different retailers, and the amount coming from each retailer is an accurate representation of the console retailer market (as in, if Best-Buy sells 30% of the consoles in the states, 30% of the tracked consoles has to be from average best-buy stores), it would be more than enough to get very safe numbers (99% probability of it being true)
If the numbers are only from one outlet, the numbers are statistically, worthless.
If you'd have perfect samples, correctly spread out according to retailers marketshare, you would only need to track 990 consoles (out of a million sold each week) to get a number that is 95% accurate.
Sorry if my english isn't good enough to explain this properly.
Most likely Vgcharts doesn't have any, or few, actual retail sources. That's just a cover so he doesn't have to admit he extrapolates from NPD etc, because then they could get him for copyright infringment.
All he does is basically extrapolate from NPD/media create/Euro news blurbs/past history/public console shipment PR.
That said, his methods are pretty thorough and he knows the numbers. His numbers are the best attempt easily available on the web.
For weekly sales, I'm sure he's just making a monthly guesstimate based on the methods outlined above, and dividing by 4, etc.
Now that you know NPD numbers come tell me again they are reliable so I can laugh at you
Yes we had the NPD debate last year on that forum too While not perfect they track a lot of more sources.