VG Chartz - History

History

VGChartz began in June 2005 when Brett Walton created an area on everythingandnothing.org.uk (as the site he had created at the time) called "videogame sales charts" which collected publicly available video game sales data in one place for users to view. In July 2006, Brett launched VGCharts.org, a stand-alone version of the sub-site on everythingandnothing and still collecting publicly available data together from across the web. In March 2007, Brett bought the VGChartz.com domain and rebranded the site as VGChartz. With this re-launch came the move from collecting publicly available data to carrying out original research on the videogame market, and VGChartz began to produce its own weekly charts.

In June 2008 Robert Pasarella wrote an article comparing VGChartz and NPD services, advantages and disadvantages, VGChartz being the winner due to the modality on their service. However, in the same month Simon Carless wrote an article in which he criticized VG Chartz for the poor tracking of a video game Iron Man in comparison to NPD, for adjusting data to match other sales tracking firms in certain cases, and for making educated guesses for some figures data for other regions. Brett argued against the claims made by Simon, indicating that he had cherry-picked certain pieces of data to present VGChartz in a bad light rather than present a fair evaluation of the data.

With the launch of PlayStation Move and Kinect towards the end of 2010, renewed interest in the videogame market led VGChartz to report estimates for initial sales of both pieces of hardware. Aaron Greenberg, Microsoft Chief of Staff for Interactive Entertainment Business openly criticized VGChartz data for Kinect on his Twitter feed, later adding "Sorry if my note offended". The comments from Greenberg prompted Walton to write an editorial "Why it is so Easy to Blame VGChartz" in which he addressed why media organisations and publishers try to undermine the data and methods on the site.