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[Mihail]

And I'm asking both ways: do they allow for games that were bought used and for games that were sold back to stores? I'm inclined to believe that they don't take this into consideration because of the complicated algorithms involved, but I'm still curious. Thanks.

 

[Fuzzy]

No, only new SW and HW (plus factory refurbished) numbers are reported by NPD so that's all tie-ratios reflect.

 

[Lee N]

It doesn't really matter if gamers sell back their games to the store, the developers of the games have already sold the game and been paid for it. It's at the stores loss if they are unable to re-sell the game that they have bought back.

 

[Mihail]

It doesn't really matter if gamers sell back their games to the store, the developers of the games have already sold the game and been paid for it. It's at the stores loss if they are unable to re-sell the game that they have bought back.

Yeah, I know sales won't be affected. I was just curious as to how accurate tie-ratios really are. My guess is that they are not very accurate at all, since many, many people sell games back to stores. Just a personal curiosity.

 

[Lee N]

Well, the tie ratio just indicates how many games have been sold divided by how many system that have been sold. It doesn't matter if all games eventually end up back at a store in some bargain bin, the games are still out in circulation meaning that they're off the developers and publishers hands.

 

[Version 3.0]

A tougher question, and one I've been curious about. Do hardware sales take into account legitimate returns? If someone returns a PS2, say because their kid really wanted an Xbox and they didn't know, does that equal -1 in PS2 sales? Not that it really matters since returns would probably equal a statistic value of 0% of sales, but I wonder...

I know the system I used to work with quite possibly wouldn't have done so. It would +1 to inventory for a return, but if you queried the system for unit sales, it wouldn't reflect, because it would just be searching for a certain transaction type (sale), and total them. If you wanted true inventory movement, you'd have to query it differently. I wonder which data NPD gets...maybe it varies by retailer...

I don't know how NPD gets their data. Is it submitted by someone at each retail chain, or is it collected via some type of network hooked up to the POS systems? Anyone know?