NPD vs. VGC Top 10 Software for May 2007 - News

by VGChartz Staff , posted on 14 June 2007 / 1,910 Views

I have assembled data for the comparable weeks of coverage between NPD and VGC data. Below, you will see that while Vgcharts continues to improve in accuracy, it is no where near perfect yet. Still, only two titles were too far off for the month when compared to NPD, which is reputed to cover far more data than any other agency tracking videogame sales in the USA. For simplicity (as the software doesn't match up completely), I have only compared USA NPD to VGC software data. As such, in cases where NPD USA is 5-10% lower than VGcharts, then you can roughly assume that the data is only 0-5% different, with Canada NPD accounting for 5% of VGC data as an average. I have added the two versions of Pokemon together from NPD for direct comparison to VGcharts, meaning that overall, of the 9 comparable titles, 6 of the 9 titles on Vgcharts were within 20% of USA NPD. Factoring in 5% average software sales for Canada brings those 6 titles to within 15%.

With that said, here is the table:

	Title	Platform	VGCharts	NPD USA	within _%
1	Pokemon D/P	DS	591k	569k	5%
2	Mario Party 8	Wii	141k	314k	not close
3	Spiderman 3	PS2	256k	249k	5%
4	Wii Play	Wii	224k	227k	5%
5	Forza 2	Xbox 360	149k	217k	1/3 too low
6	GH II	Xbox 360	147k	184k	20%
7	Spiderman 3	Xbox 360	183k	140k	30%
8	C&C 3: Tib Wars	Xbox 360	281k	138k	not close
9	GH II	PS2	149k	131k	15%

13 Comments

princess (on 19 February 2009)

mrstickball (on 15 June 2007)

The issue is that every single game VG tracked that were within 10% were holdovers, and MP8, Forza, and C&C 3 were all 3 new games.

Ultimately, VGChartz is very poor on tracking new games. Pokemon D/P, Forza, Guitar Hero 2 (last month), and Mario Party 8 were quite a bit under, but Spiderman and C&C 3 were over.

Ultimately, ioi will NEVER be considered within 10% accuracy until he is able to get more stores to give launch figures. Once he can get more stores to track sales, it will get alot better. That, I know, is the only reason the numbers are off.

IMO, the main reason for this is that he probably isn't getting sales numbers from stores like Wal-Mart, K-Mart, or such general retailers - these stores are far more likely to move major units of games like Mario Party and Pokemon, and less likely to move games like C&C3. I underpredicted C&C3 every prediction league even because I knew it'd do worse - and it did.

Still, ioi provides us a resource no one else does. He is to be commended for what he does. Ultimately, however, the best answer is him making inroads to get POS sales information from major retailers. He, as well as the VGC staff need to put more time and effort on getting new retailers. Even if he had to get information from them every month, data would be far more accurate. Even movie predictions start out with box office estimates, that are always off, before the actual sales are tabulated on Monday after the weekend.

Erik Aston (on 15 June 2007)

ioi has been off on first-week sales of big titles repeatedly. We've seen it with titles which happen to come at the ends of NPD tracking periods repeatedly. This month there happened to be two such games--Mario Party and Forza. If that one issue were resolved, the data would look good. Command and Conquer is the other one way off... And the Spiderman 3 360 number was significantly too high as well. It seems all things 360 were way overtracked this month.

Lingyis (on 15 June 2007)

considering that the ones that are off the most are newly launched games, it's not that bad. of course, unfortunately, it's also the newly launched game sales that we're most interested in.

that being said, i think these numbers are perfectly respectable, even for the 30% off.

one problem with putting a bias in your estimate is that this bias is based on past history, and if the trend is broken, your bias accentuates the error. i have no idea how ioi collects his data, but it's only he himself doing it, which is like 1 guy, and this isn't even his full-time job. i'd be impressed if he tracks as many as 30 stores.

KruzeS (on 15 June 2007)

Maybe ioi doesn't track the kinds of stores that do pre-orders?

diegomoroco777 (on 14 June 2007)

Ok, if those MP8 numbers are real, then I understand why Nintendo is going for the casual and non gamers. I mean...how much money are they getting thanks to those games >_<

TheSource (on 14 June 2007)

ioi doesn't have as much data coverage as npd, so there is always a chance he will pick on trends that are localized or just off-kilter with national trends in his sampling. The data is still much better than it was in March, and slightly better than in April. Generally speaking, months in the future will be more accurate as ioi gets more coverage, and months with exceptionally high volume will be be more accurate as they normalize sales trends from the macro level all the way down to the sampling level..

euclid (on 14 June 2007)

strange month to say the least...

Rath (on 14 June 2007)

Wow your real accurate on some and MILES out on others. How did that happen?

DonWii (on 14 June 2007)

It sold it in 4 DAYS.

diegomoroco777 (on 14 June 2007)

Holy crap, MP8 sold 314k in 1 WEEK?????
Forza did better too.

NPD is only counting the first MP8 and Forza week ?

shams (on 14 June 2007)

Idea - maybe the stores tracking MP8 all sold out - and certain untracked stores received a much larger shipment figure.

Its a lot easier to extrapolate the figures when something doesn't sell out??

shams (on 14 June 2007)

I find it amazing that WiiPlay figures are so accurate - yet MP8 is out by so much.

Maybe some stores (not tracked by VG) released early? Or maybe it includes online sites, or other?

If ioi can solve what has caused this (its almost 3:1 off for MP8!), then he has gone a long way to solving all the tracking issues.

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NPD vs. VGC Top 10 Software for May 2007 - News

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