Bullza wrote:I think there's more to it than simply making them up, if you look at the sales for the previous games in the series they are in line with official figures that have been given. This is what the guy who runs the site had to say about how they come up with their numbers.
http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/post.php?id=6880410
It's certainly not pin point accurate in the same way Media Create might be but it does give a general idea which is all that's really available until an official source comes in.
VGChartz goes back and revises their numbers once official data comes through:
One of the most unexpected results in the recent NPD charts for May was the appearance of the poorly reviewed Iron Man game for PlayStation 2 in the Top 10 of the charts, with 130,000 copies sold.
Thinking about it carefully, with the movie rocketing to unexpected success during the month, it would make sense that the game would sell well. But it's not the kind of game that you're likely to estimate in the Top 10 - and indeed VGChartz did not, estimating 53,000 units in sales, according to VGChartz staffers.
But what's surprising is that Iron Man for PlayStation 2 has been adjusted in its official VGChartz page so that its first four weeks of sales (encompassing May) add up to 111,000 units.
Clearly, these numbers have been changed after NPD debuted, showing a couple of things. Firstly, if you were a journalist, you could have cited VGChartz as saying Iron Man was a flop on PS2, selling half as many units - when NPD vibrantly disagrees. In addition, and more interestingly, it shows that VGChartz trusts NPD over their own prediction data by retroactively changing things to better match.
The amount of concrete data available to VGChartz is low - as is freely admitted in a recent interview, VGChartz had 2-3% of the North American market as a sample at the time, whereas by estimate, NPD might have 60-65%. If this 2-3% was clean and canonical, this might not matter - but how do you explain the big Iron Man discrepancy, if so? Wouldn't VGChartz' retail sources have picked it up too?
We picked two titles released for one of the next-gen consoles over the previous year, neither of which had been in the public NPD charts for more than a month, leaving VGChartz to make estimates based on their own sources on their selling curve over time.
Well, somewhat spectacularly, in both cases, NPD and VGChartz disagreed by about 100%. In one case, VGChartz was citing 300,000 sales, whereas NPD had the game at 150,000 units. And in the other case, it was inversed - NPD had the game at around 200,000, but VGChartz had it at 100,000.
This is an old article, but many of its points still carry weight against VGChartz:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/1098 ... me_Biz.php"I like the money it brings in, but Dragon Ball Heroes is the worst. That's actually the real reason I decided to start working on new material. I was afraid Bandai would make something irredeemably stupid like Super Saiyan 4 Broly." - Akira Toriyama, made up interview, 2013.
