Zero Punctuation: The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

[Thanatos2k]

Statistical extrapolation is madness for video games though in most cases. For example, people can like one game in a series then utterly despise the next (see: Final Fantasy). Assassin's Creed 4 sold millions less than Assassin's Creed 3, but the extrapolations would have told you otherwise. Same thing with games of the same genre. How much would Kingdoms of Amalur sell? It's sort of like Skyrim and Fable AND multiplatform, so surely it would sell those numbers, right? (Actually, vgchartz grossly underestimated KoA sales back when it came out)

Thing is, the margin of error is just too large and the examples where vgchartz is off the mark by massive amounts too numerous for it to be useful here. THAT is why vgchartz is inaccurate and not to be used by anyone in any credible argument. An Atlus employee famously once came out and said vgchartz hadn't been close to the actual sales of ANY of their games.

VGC is the most accurate measure of sales we got available, and to dismiss it outright is simply stupid. Knowing that the sales is around number X is better than not knowing anything at all.

No, that is false. Knowing something that is inaccurate can lead dumb people to draw bad conclusions. Saying "I don't know" is better than saying something with flawed data. Until a company releases numbers saying how much they sold, NO ONE knows how many copies any game sold anymore.

Sigh, i typed a reply and then my browser decided to randomly go to some website because apperently i pressed soem shortcut. ill try again.
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It is quite clear that you do not know how statistics work.
Statistical extrapolation for sales is not madness. It is used by every statistical institution in the world. This is because exact data from all existing retailers is simply impossible.
Here is how it works: You take data from sources you have and then expand on it to fit all retailers (in this case). For example the methodology page shows that regions they have account for 70% of global sales. Then they extrapolate data from those countries to global using this assumption. As you already pointed out, if their assumtions are incorrect they adjust them as more data becomes available. However its worth noting that you should not mix the data publishers give with sales data. Publishers give data of items sold in their accouting sense. As in, wholesale sales. This however does not mean retail sales. all those items you see sitting on shelves, in storage and on the way - thats a discrepancy between the two. and if the game sells poorly but publisher printed many copies - thats going to be a large gap.
Statistical extrapolation has nothing to do with predicting sequel sales. Your example shows that you do not know what statistical extrapolation is as it has nothing to do with it.

An Atlus employee WOULDNT KNOW the actual sales of its games unless he did a specific investigation. that is because wholesale sales =/= retail sales. Thanks to NDA and secrecy in the industry most developers actually look at sites like VGC for data rather than get thier own. Weve seen developers that complain about Steam refusing to tell them how well their game sold even.

Also you keep talking about inaccuracies yet there are still no numerical examples or evidence from your side. For all i know you could be making it all up because you dislike the site.

And yes, knowing some data is better than knowing none. Otherwise you would still be living in a cave hunting animals with a rock.

You can say anything you want about the theory, but there's a reason why they're theories. The fact of the matter is vgchartz's method of statistical estimation DOES NOT PRODUCE RESULTS IN LINE WITH REALITY. It happens over and over and over and over and over again. Is it because their methods are flawed? Is it because their implementation of the methods are flawed? It doesn't matter, that's their problem to deal with. All we care is do they produce accurate results and the answer is no.

So any sane person would conclude that vgchartz is therefore not to be trusted.

And yes, an Atlus employee is the only one who can produce an accurate count of sales, because they have all the data. You kidding?

Digital distribution however is different. Digital distribution sales figures can be obscured depending on which company you're talking about. Some companies don't share the numbers. Some companies share the numbers with developers but prohibit them from sharing those numbers with anyone else. It's different across the board on a case by case basis.

But vgchartz (or the NPD) doesn't count digital sales, cannot count digital sales, and never has. So that's irrelevant to this discussion. The Atlus employee was talking about physical hard copies, and the statement was made before console game digital distribution was even a thing.

 

[Strazdas]

You can say anything you want about the theory, but there's a reason why they're theories. The fact of the matter is vgchartz's method of statistical estimation DOES NOT PRODUCE RESULTS IN LINE WITH REALITY. It happens over and over and over and over and over again. Is it because their methods are flawed? Is it because their implementation of the methods are flawed? It doesn't matter, that's their problem to deal with. All we care is do they produce accurate results and the answer is no.

So any sane person would conclude that vgchartz is therefore not to be trusted.

And yes, an Atlus employee is the only one who can produce an accurate count of sales, because they have all the data. You kidding?

Digital distribution however is different. Digital distribution sales figures can be obscured depending on which company you're talking about. Some companies don't share the numbers. Some companies share the numbers with developers but prohibit them from sharing those numbers with anyone else. It's different across the board on a case by case basis.

But vgchartz (or the NPD) doesn't count digital sales, cannot count digital sales, and never has. So that's irrelevant to this discussion. The Atlus employee was talking about physical hard copies, and the statement was made before console game digital distribution was even a thing.

Please dont be that guy that doesnt know what a theory is [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory]

Statistical estimation produce results that are close to reality with a quite large significance level. That is acceptable in all statistican fields.
f you conclude that this is enough not to trust them, then you cannot trust ANY statistical information, which means were going back to dark ages. Sorry, but id rather have knowledge. What you are doing is applying double standarts for site you dont like and hiding it under not trusting their method when you have shown you dont even know how that method works.

Atluns employee has very little chance of knowing accurate count of sales. For one, he would need to be a person responsible for collecting sale data and not every employee is responsible for that. For two, please read again my explanation why wholesale and retail sales are different. Atlus (and other publisher) count wholesale sales. What is actually important to us is Retail sales.

I was not talking about digital distribution at all. So you responding like i was i have to assume you do not know what wholesale is. You could read up on it [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wholesale], though judging by how well you read VGC methodology i dont expect that.

Lack of digital sale measures is indeed a problem, but as you said noone counts them and many publishers themselves dont know them, so expecting some third party to count them is a bit too much.


to reiterate, you have shown repeated lack of knowledge on the subject, appear to not even fully udnerstand what i am talking about and have shown me no evidence of VGC data being invalid.

 

[Thanatos2k]

Please don't be that guy who nitpicks words instead of addresses points. We already had that guy. Stop insulting my intelligence, I know what theorems and wholesale are.

You can trot out all the justification of statistical estimation to your heart's content, but it doesn't matter if THE RESULTS ARE INCORRECT.

Atlus employees have no chance of knowing sales? Stop making crap up. Even if they weren't the person who collects sales data, stuff like that is communicated internally. I work at one of the big internet companies and I could tell you our unique daily page views despite not working anywhere on the front end or collecting such statistics. An Atlus employee would be likely to know BOTH retail and wholesale sales, because collecting both numbers is sort of important to developers.

To reiterate the point you keep desperately avoiding - vgchartz is inaccurate more often than it is accurate, and the frequency and magnitude of those inaccuracies prove it is not to be trusted. Regardless of their methodology, regardless of your statistical theories - they produce bad numbers, and no one should be using their bad numbers to make sales arguments.

 

[C14N]

I was obviously referring to the PS4 and Xbox One. When you say "the other consoles" it's a given that you mean the other ones from the same generation, not the old ones.

Why is that a given?

A console competes against what else is on the market. "Generations" are irrelevant. The release of the PS4 and Xbone didn't make the PS3 and 360 suddenly stop existing. Those are still viable as "other consoles," and are still sold in the stores right alongside the Wii U.

I really don't see very many people considering a purchase of a Wii U against the PS4 or Xbone - the market for the Wii U is much more likely to be considering it against the PS3 and 360. The reality is that "generations" is just a construct of the industry that few consumers care about. People will buy what they like regardless of such arbitrary categories.

No it isn't, every time I've seen the Wii U brought up (which admittedly isn't that often) it's somebody comparing it to the PS4 and the Xbox One, usually complaining that it's getting so little attention. They briefly shared shelf space but that's it; the reasons for buying each one is completely different. Somebody buying a Wii U in 2013 was buying something they planned to use for the next few years, expecting the currently empty library to be filled over time. Somebody buying a PS3 or 360 was grabbing a console they never bothered with all this time so they could catch up on the nearly complete library of games they missed at a fairly low price. Nobody was buying those thinking "I'll get a few years of use out of this". And at the 2014 shopping season (as well as in 2015, 2016 and so on), people will be deciding between Wii U, PS4 and XBO; not between Wii U, PS3 and 360, at least as long as it isn't a Dreamcast-like flop.

They don't technically "stop existing" in that there is still stock in the shops to be sold but they sort of do. They're going to stop manufacturing them in the next few months and within about a year the development pool generally starts to dry up after a short transition period where games are released on both generations. They're at the end of their lives now and pretty much anybody who picks one up now is fully aware of that.

The fact that the generations are constructed by the industry is irrelevant because they still completely exist and heavily influence media coverage and what people buy. The sales of both the PS3 and the 360 dipped strongly in 2013 which was completely due to those "arbitrary categories"

The Wii U didn't launch against the PS3 or 360 any more than the 360 launched against the PS2.

But the 360 did release against the PS2. And the Wii did launch against the 360 and PS3. Those were the competition at launch, and still make up the major competition. Do you really think that when the Wii U launched, people were comparing it to the unreleased Sony and Microsoft consoles, rather than what was actually on the shelves?

It wasn't "against" the PS2. The PS2 was the undisputed winner of it's time. It was still around at the time of the 360 launch but it was not competition for the 360. The kind of people who bought a 360 in that year mostly already owned a PS2 or at least an Xbox and they wanted something that would be around after those consoles were done. It's just a case of one manufacturer gets their product to ship a few months before the competition.