A you trying to make me a feminist?Follow

Inevitable, considering it'd be left without a leg to stand on.

Gamers don't have to be your audience. Gamers are over.

Newsflash: People that make money from video game sales expect strong video game sales!

...

...



SpoilerYes, I realize it's a non-profit thingy for gaming type people, po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to. Still I agree the rumors about the death of the PC gaming market were greatly exaggerated.

Considering this generation system is only slightly more powerful than the last, I'd say gaming might not be dead but it has certainly plateaued.

Gaming died when they released Tetris with bugs.

I wonder how they predict the change in console game sales between 2015-2019.

Every company I've consulted for whenever I did work on anything related to sales forecasting:

"How do you guys arrive at the forecast number."
"We review previous sales and market conditions"
"Oh, great. Is there a model I can see?"
"Well, there is but make a lot of sanity check changes before it goes into production"
"Ok, so you use a model to generate forecasts and then change the results because they don't make sense?"
"Well...haha gee when you put it that way. Yes, though. Yes, that's what we do."
"So an educated personal guess is the bottom line."
"Again that sounds silly put that way...but yes."
"Do you compare the actual results against the forecast results?"
"Yes, of course, we're always pretty close!"
"Do you compare them against the unedited model predictions?"
*crickets*
"I'm not sure we've done that, because it's so far off most of the time."
"Ok, can I test the model a little with historical data?"
"Well, it's proprietary."
"I signed 1000 DNAs."
"Maybe."
Someone gets fired in a few weeks.

That was longer than I intended, but the answer to your question is almost certainly "guessing".

Haha! OMG that reminds me of a "wtf" moment back when I was the lead file server admin.

I was working up a proposal to purchase a rather large amount of disk space. I had written a process to gather quota data from all the servers, collate them with time data using revision based checkouts (so, assuming proper revision control was used on the control files, we could grab a snapshot of allocated disk quotas at any arbitrary point in time across all our servers), and then construct a set of graphs showing monthly total quota allocation on all file servers over time. I then built a forecast model based on that historical growth pattern, projected for a given amount of time, and estimated how many disks/shelves/heads we'd need to cover predicted engineering data space needs. Honestly, the data collection side was the biggest pain. The prediction was pretty straightforward (data growth rates were quite consistent, in fact).

In any case, I go up to the purchasing person. I'm a bit nervous because this is the first time I've done this. Prior to this, if I needed something, I just said "I need X", and then off it goes into an approval system, and eventually X arrives. I'd never directly interacted with the money folks before. I had my charts in hand, all the data I'd used, and a nicely written justification. All ready to go. I hand this to the woman, and what happened next can only be described as surreal. I watched as she did "math", that basically consisted of taking the number I'd said I needed, then dividing it among the number of systems I had written down, then multiplying by some "factor", then taking a separate count of the systems, and dividing that by the same "factor" (I honestly have no clue what it was), and then multiplying those two numbers together to arrive at a final amount.

Um.... Which resulted in the exact same number I'd given her. Basically, all my projections and data didn't really matter at all. I may have fudged the details of the process she used (I'm reasonably sure I blanked it out of my mind to protect my sanity), but basically it mathematically resulted in whatever number she was given initially. At first I was tempted to point this out, but then I realized that would just be pure folly, so I accepted that I'd gotten what I wanted and walked out. I recall pointing this out to my boss, and he just kinda nodded and said something about "they really just care that you spent time generating a number". So the fact that I had some data, and pretty pretty charts and graphs, was sufficient. Didn't really matter what was on them.

Edited, Mar 2nd 2015 2:27pm by gbaji

Good god, your jobs sound boring. How do you make it through the day?

Internet.

Also I just located an ADP-Ribosylation site by ignoring what the software was telling me and following my gut. If you do what the model tells you too you're going to end up in the same place as everyone else blinding following the same instructions.

People.

Sixty-eight thousand posts.

By latching on to a typo, making long streams of barely puns, and desperately hoping someone notices.

Edited, Mar 3rd 2015 7:40pm by Allegory

There was a site called "OMG" that was considered top 15%?

I can still ignore it though, right?