User:Glowsquid/Brain Palace

This is where I dump my half-baked projects and any other wiki-relevant things.

Sales data

Finding reliable sales figure can be problematic, thanks to the videogame industry's notorious secrecy toward financial data. Here's some pointers to what you should and should not use.

Several independent firms such as the NPD Group (North America), Chart Track (Europe) and Media Create (Japan) track game sales at retail chains. While these organisations do not have access to 100% of any given region's sales data, they're one of the very few authoritative source of hard data, and are often used by video game companies. Though most of the data is not available to non-subscribers, the trackers frequently publish monthly reports.

Press releases from Nintendo and other corporate sources are also accurate, and occasionally include digital sales numbers, which the aforementioned trackers do not factor in. However, said press releases frequently give the numbers of copies shipped to retailers rather than actual sales, so users should examine the wording before citing them.

VGChartz

Due to its popularity and being the most immediatly visible sourcee when researching sales data, it's hard not to address VGChartz

Much has been written about VGChartz reliability. As explained on the site's methodology page, it has access to data from an undefined sampling of "retail partners" and guess the rest based on various trends. VGChartz numbers have frequently been contradicted by more official channels (In one instance, the site polled the game Arc Rise Fantasia as a best-seller for June 2010 despite the game not being released until the end of July), and several sites have banned the usage of it as a source. As far as the wiki is concerned, VGChartz is not reliable and should not be used as a reference for sales data.