[quote=Sharp] No these are not margins of error. They are ranges. And saying a sales figure falls somewhere between 2 million and 5 million is the equivalent of saying nothing at all. It is completely useless information and does not qualify as data. You cannot input a range into a dataset. It makes no sense. In the case of BG3, is it 2 m? Is it 5 m? Is it something else? Who knows. And it makes a HUGE difference whether it is 2 m versus 5 m. And if Steamspy is saying "we don't know if it is 2 m or 5 m," then they are literally saying there is a margin of error of something like 95% to what they're saying, and anything with that huge a margin of error is useless information.
The margin of error is calculated based on 98% confidence (if you know your math). What it means is that around 2% games have wrong stats on Steam Spy that are outside of the stated margin of error.
Whilst the exact margins of error are not provided to you unless you subscribe to the service, you can be pretty damn absolutely sure the margins of error are within the given ranges they provide there. Ergo, the statistic has some value. How about you actually learn something about Steamspy first before commenting on it?
Yeah, don't be an ass. I'm quite confident my knowledge of statistics is way beyond yours.
All this is saying is that Steamspy has 98% confidence the true sales number falls somewhere between 2 million and 5 million. It is easy as pie to have that kind of confidence when you place your value between such a humongous range (i.e. margin of error). The confidence is not the issue. The range is the issue. In any other walk of life, if you gave someone a margin of error of 3 million and then said, "Don't worry; I have 98% confidence the true number is somewhere within that 3 million margin of error," they would laugh you out of the room.
