FYI,
NPD does extensive market research across 150,000 shoppers across the nation each and every month. It's the basis of their entire business which, believe it or not, includes a hell of a lot more than just video games.
They also do work directly with Wal-Mart and while, they may not have exact Wal-Mart totals from their system, they do have a very good idea where Wal-Mart shifts.
They have been quite slow to update their historical market share numbers and from what I've heard, they feel extremely confident that they should have revised their market share numbers down. However, they seem to have placed a bit too much importance on some very strange pollings in November (which was true for all of retail, thus Wall Street and the media having a very difficult time telling how the holiday season is going) and really, really sent the analysts over the deep end. It was too much too fast and on too little data.
It's always been a projected number and I'd say the numbers have been pretty damn good and their trying to react to a changing marketplace. Wal-Mart & Best Buy in particular seem to continue to take market share at a pretty heavy pace.
Although, I suppose it's good for this forum to place less importance on NPD.
Amused_To_Death said:
Just an FYI, those NPD numbers are not very accurate. They are based on numbers from participating retailers (Target, Best Buy, Gamestop, EB, Toys R Us, ...) which account to 63% of the U.S. overall retail market. Walmart, the biggest retailers with over 22% of the market is not accounted for, nor are the 15% of the smaller retailers. No one knows what the exact formula for extrapolating the rest of the market. NPD charges thousands for its subscription and it is not very transparent service. Hopefully this episode will force them to clean up their service.
I know that you know this and that you know NPD's reporting, but they have some damn good metrics from a statistical standpoint. They have much more information that just historical information and raw numbers from participating retailers of which I touched on above. The biggest problem is that they made a big change at an important time and caught people off guard. The second biggest problem, IMO, is the truly substantial one.
They do not do ~much accounting for monster sales (Wal-Mart having GBA @ $44, TRU having a 3 for 2 sale, etc) and they also don't account much for certain products / genres / target markets in the NPD. They just use a relatively simple market share calculation with a couple of modifiers and apply it to all of the games / systems / accessories. It doesn't make any significant statistical difference to the overall market, or honestly to 95% of products. However, there are a number of products that they can be substantially wrong about.
In any case, I hope that none of you harbor the illusion that any other tracking systems are much better. NPD goes MUCH farther than anybody else in terms of determining market shares, and their achilles heel is that Wal-Mart opted out of participation. The higher the participation, the better your results, obviously. But, just so you know, statistically, they have unbelievably accurate numbers.
Why do you think that Media Create / Dengeki / Famitsu can report such widely disparate numbers? And Europe is just a complete mess with all of the countries and selections of retailers.
I'm certainly not saying NPD is perfect and they could use to do ALOT better in terms of retailer participation, timeliness (but, actually, this is also retailers faults) and a more complex extrapolation for the spikes in their data.
jamesinclair said:
When they retracted it, didnt they say theyd have the new numbers out in 24 hours?
:lol
These guys run the best business.
Long delays? Check. Innacurate numbers? Check. Subscribers paying thousands of dollars? Check.
Actually, they didn't say that. They said they'd give subscribers an
informational update on Friday, which they did. And it's not like you're paying a penny for the information, so please don't try to speak for those folks who do. I'm sure there's ALOT of upset people, but it's more complex than simply calling them slow and inaccurate.
They're gonna sell everything they can get in to the US stores no doubt.
