How accurate are sales trackers? The answer is not really very easy to determine, since there are rarely any standards to benchmark against. NPD has a monopoly in the US, so the only comparison can be made with manufacturer sales to retail and a ballpark estimate of retail stock. Chart-Track and GfK typically have local monopolies in Europe, and rarely release public sales figures besides. Japan, however, has a unique situation, with two professional sales trackers releasing weekly sales figures to the public. Both Famitsu (Enterbrain) and Media Create cover about 2/3 of the market, so how much can that remaining 1/3 affect the accuracy of the figures? Let's take a look at the latest week of sales data to get an idea.
First, a look at the hardware sales data from each tracker:
Type....Famitsu.....Media Cr......% Diff
PSP.........73k..........90k.............21%
Wii...........71k..........67k..............6%
DSL.........48K..........51k..............6%
PS3.........8.5k...........8k..............6%
PS2...........8k.........7.5k..............6%
360.........1.7k.........1.3k.............27%
What do we see here? Well, what stands out the most is the large 21% difference in PSP sales between the two trackers. Combined with the 6% difference in Wii sales, look at how the sales narrative changes. While this piece isn't meant to compare VGC numbers, as a side note the VGC values for each piece of hardware and software listed were somewhere in between the Famitsu and Media Create numbers.
