Chart-Track lays the smackdown on Pachter

Finally someone puts that figure loving fuck-wit in his place!

For a jumped up accountant Michael Pachter sure gets his name on a lot of gaming headlines.  The most recent bought of headlines concerns a declaration made by Broadpoint AmTech analyst Ben Schachter who stated that, based on the UK day 1 sales figures for confirmed by Chart-Track, that Modern Warfare had sold 1.23 million copies and that the overall estimated first day sales for for the game would be around 7 million units.

“With GTA IV selling-through 6mm units worldwide in its first week, that suggests week one of Modern Warfare 2 worldwide sell-through could approximate ~11.7mm. While 2x the week one tally for GTA IV may seem aggressive, the bottom line is that we believe current consensus estimates of around 12mm for the December quarter may end up being conservative,” Schachter said.

Now Pachter steps up a short time later and refutes the claims made by Schacter saying :-

“7 million is therefore a very reasonable estimate, if we accept that the UK figure is accurate. My guess is that it’s not.  I don’t know how anyone could aggregate UK sales that fast.  I’d say it’s far more likely that the game sold no more than 5 million on day 1 (my bias is 4 million), and that it won’t hit 7 million until the end of the weekend,” he told us.  However, you can’t argue with ‘facts’ such as Chart Track reports of first day sales. I have a feeling that the figure includes all preorders, but not necessarily those units actually picked up on day 1,”.

Now those are fairly strong words directed at the creadability of Chart-Track whether PAchter meant it that way or not.  So Chart Track have seen fit to lay waste to this disagreement with a statement of it’s own from director Dorian Bloch :-

Concerning the comments made on VG247, subsequently picked up on by various sites, including Gamesindustry.biz, I would like to clarify the situation concerning UK Day 1 sales of ‘Modern Warfare 2′, especially the “I don’t know how anyone could aggregate UK sales that fast”.

• The first point is that UK retailers have been at the forefront of electronic data capture for decades, which in turn allows us to capture daily sales from 99% of retailers on our panel. That’s over 6000 retail outlets plus all the etailers – currently 25 different store fronts.
• Every retailer on our panel supplies Electronic Point of Sale data. In the specific case of pre-orders through retailers with high street stores, we can and do pick these up sometimes months before a product actually launches and these are set up by the retailer to report as a specific retailer code. When the product goes live we begin to track sales on the actual barcode for that product, along with the actual selling price for every single transaction.
• In the specific case of online retailers and pre-orders, the moment they ship a product it registers as a sale in the daily transaction files we are sent. Online retailers have to ship the product in advance in order to hit the street date, so we will pick up actual sales (shipped to the customer) prior to the day 1 release. These are re-dated to day 1.

I hope that this helps to explain how we get to release an accurate day 1 sell-through so quickly. Of course, with so many retailers and stores, we will release a final figure for day 1 / week 1 sales of ‘Modern Warfare 2′ after we have produced the week 46 UK entertainment software chart, this coming Sunday. We run a Sunday-Saturday chart week, so this will cover the first 5 days of sell-through for MW2 and the date range is Sunday 8th November up to including Saturday 14th November, sales up to midnight. Because we get daily sales we actually produce the final chart each and every Sunday, with our retailers/publishers getting a full analysis of the UK market by Monday morning, 10am.

The reason why we call the 1.23m a day 1 estimate is because with so many retailers, it is always possible that some data will actually arrive later in the week, due to technical reasons or transmission problems. We will therefore release final figures as indicated above.

So there you have it really.  Chart-Track are pretty damn sure of their figures and the only room for movement is that they may increase based on sales data not yet entered.  We will have to wait unti lteh chart is published Monday morning to see what comes of these ramblings.

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