Example 1: World of Warcraft Reaches New Milestone: 10 Million Subscribers [link]
Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced today that subscribership for World of Warcraft, its award-winning massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), has continued to climb, recently passing 10 million worldwide. Interest in the game has remained high in all regions, with thousands of new and returning players signing up through the holiday season. World of Warcraft now hosts more than 2 million subscribers in Europe, more than 2.5 million in North America, and approximately 5.5 million in Asia.
Example 2: Halo 3 knocks Wii Play out of top selling spot for 2007 [link (one of many)]
Today's NPD sales numbers reveal that Bungie's Halo 3 was the best selling game in the United States in 2007, with a whopping 4.82 million copies sold. Nipping at Master Chief's heels was Nintendo's own Wii Play. It sold through a staggering 4.12 million units to the masses.
Which of the above two articles has the more accurate headline? The first one of course. The second article proudly proclaims one thing but, in the first line of the write-up they add in the qualifier that they are talking about video games sold in the USA. You could chalk this up to an editorial blunder but I see it happening far too often (in video game news) to see it as such.
The Numbers Game
If you massage numbers enough you can make the numbers say anything you want them to.
In more recent political news there was a US Presidential primary held in Nevada. On the Democrat side one candidate one the popular vote while another won more delegates (delegates count in primaries) yet the news reported the popular vote winner as the winner. Did the media learn nothing in 2000 when the popular vote winner (Al Gore) did not win the actual (Electoral College) Presidential vote?
The same thing goes on in video games news, it's all about the headline and many people in the industry do not care if the headline is wrong if it paints them in a good light.
Two Groups of Numbers
We currently have two major players in the video game sales number game; NPD Group and VGChartz. The NPD Group is often considered more credible while VGChartz is often painted as a bunch of kids sitting around a computer making up numbers. Both of these groups have good an bad qualities to them but we need both to get a good picture of what is going on.
The one chief failing of NPD is their limited market. They only release data for North America when talking about video game sales. This is fine when your audience is strictly from North America but, with many websites having global audiences you need to make it perfectly clear that the article you are writing is based on only a small portion of the gaming world. If we look at the success of World Of Warcraft we quickly see that only 25% of their paid members reside in North America. I know it is not scientific to use the data from one company to prove a trend but... Why is the reverse being done?
VGCgartz has this to say about their number tracking system:
Unlike many other websites (which use manufacturer shipment figures and reports to estimate current console sales), VG Chartz collects data directly from retailers all over the world. Retailer sample sizes are small compared to professional tracking services, but are large enough to provide very accurate projections of the latest console sell through figures worldwide. We are the only provider anywhere in the world of weekly American sales charts and are expanding our data collection and coverage all the time.
NPD says this:
We collect global point-of-sale (POS) information from more than 600 retail partners – representing about 140,000 stores worldwide that have agreed to provide us with their sales information. This retailer network spans all key distribution channels: department stores, distributors, national chains, specialty stores, mass merchants, and more.
The funny thing about NPD is that they routinely mention that they get worldwide data yet all we ever see is North American data in regards to video games. What's up with that? Further, what is the deal with reputable video game news sites making misleading headlines about video game sales?
Well, Kotaku may not be as reputable as they once were. They did have the tubgirl incident last year, not to mention what their sister blog Gizmodo did at CES this year with turning off monitors in vendor booths while vendors were doing presentations. Yeah, real professional there.
I try to pull data from as many sources as I can or, if I am pulling from only one source I try my best to make it clear what source I am pulling from and leave it up to you, the reader, to decide on how valid the data is. I also try my best to only use world wide data because I simply do not believe that the world ends at the border of the USA.