Hard to believe we’re still discussing Gamestat, but okay.
If the flaws in their methodology weren’t blatantly obvious from their own explanation, let’s actually look at the data they have.
Here we can see that on December 1st, they had supposedly tracked 38,300 players and
here we can see that 22% of the players they’ve tracked are from Japan. We know that there had been 20,000 physical sales in Japan by this time and that there were 4,000 Kickstarter backers. Let’s assume there wasn’t a single digital sale.
22% of 38,300 is 8,426, meaning that despite there being around 24,000 copies of the game in circulation, they had only tracked around 1/3 of the players. This tells us that their figure is out by a ridiculous margin, most likely down to an incredibly poor sample group.
If we account for this margin when looking at their current estimate (60,000) we end up with around 180,000 players which is a lot more realistic.
But wait. There’s more. Due to a programming error, Shenmue 3 is only linked to a player’s profile after they’ve unlocked their first trophy. This is not the case for other games they track as we can see here with
Shenmue and
Shenmue II.
With both games, only around 80% of tracked players actually unlocked a trophy, so if we assume Shenmue III follows the same trend, it would suggest that around 20% of players haven’t been picked up by Game Stat when they usually would have been.
If we factor in this programming error, 180,000 becomes 225,000. That’s not including special editions, digital sales and duplicate copies.