Today I had a thought. Ya, just one all day — I’m slow like that.
Does anybody ever audit the sales figures quoted in press releases? Does anyone even have that authority?
If the company is required to have an audit each year, presumably you could confirm the sales figures if their income statement had sufficient detail, but what if not? Or what if the gaming division is a small portion of a huge entertainment conglomerate? Again, the detail might be insufficient to confirm the publicized sales.
Concurrent connections are usually vastly different from quoted box sales, so looking at census figures wouldn’t help much. Given the right set of circumstances, and within believable limits, a gaming company could substantially pad their sales figures for the press release.
Just saying.
This is the type of evil scheme that preoccupies my thoughts when stuck in evening traffic.
While it’s not an audit, anything a company releases to shareholders would, I presume, have to be 100% correct, or they would be in a bit of legal trouble. (of course, that never stopped Enron, and they do not have to say everything about the company)
Here are a few fun facts about game companies:
– If the game company is based in Japan, you can access their quarterly info on their websites (usually). I don’t know the complete details, but apparently there are some Japanese laws that require that they report in this matter, so it’s easier to find sales numbers from Nintendo, Sony, Konami, Capcom and the like than Take Two or the Microsoft gaming division.
– Sell-in vs. sell-thru – keep this in mind whenever you read a press release. Companies often like to obscure the sales numbers in this way by mentioning that a game has sold X million copies, but this often means “sold to retailers to stock in their warehouses and shelves” – i.e. sell-in. Sell thru actually means “in the customers’ hands.”
– Like Factory said above me, if the company is public, they’re obligated to their shareholders and misleading them about how the company is performing is asking for trouble.