Game Charting: Methodology Explanations

Where does this information come from?

New data: Every week I can get the Create hardware data and hardware data from those links.  For sake of completeness, though I don't track them you might also find useful software top 30 and Dengeki's software top 50.  Media Create's software top 50 is on the same page as the hardware.

Old data: As I wasn't doing this forever, I compiled data from various online sources.  Media Create data came primarily from the archives of [1] and [2].  Famitsu data came primarily from Japanese site GEIMIN.NET.

How comprehensive is the data?

For the periods actually available, pretty comprehensive.  Media Create data only goes back to the beginning of 2002, while Famitsu goes back to the beginning of 2000.  I have some earlier data, but since there are different periods missing for different systems, I've just chopped them off.  At some point I'll paste the older information online so you can do with it as you please.

Why order the systems in that particular order?

It's a holdover from the data's days in a spreadsheet.  I tried to consider a somewhat logical way to order the systems, and I decided to do it in a series of chronological orderings.  First, order the manufacturers by the order they got into the business of making game consoles: currently Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft.  Second, order the types of machine in the order they occurred: home consoles, then portable consoles... if it came to it I guess something like Virtual Boy would be in a third category.  Third, order by date of original system release.  Third-and-a-half, but keep system variants together, so Game Boy Micro isn't placed between DS and DS Lite.

Leaving us with the current active Media Create order of GCN, GBA, GBASP, GBM, DS, DSL, PS2, PS3, PSP, Xbox, X360.