donny2112 said:
If the list is going to start separating games, then separate games. Pull out BEST re-releases. Pull out International Editions. Pull out separate Pokemon totals wherever we can. It doesn't make sense to do rampant combining on some games and then attempt to separate others that are combined by the sales tracker.
The problem is that there are tons of games released in Japan with multiple versions. All kinds of stuff gets released on launch day with Limited Editions, Special Editions, what have you. From the first-day leaks that we get, many of these games even launch with the Limited Edition version shipping with more copies than the regular/standard editions. But we never receive separate sales totals for any of these games, so all of these titles are combined in our sales charts.
I honestly don't see any difference with these limited/special edition releases, and something like Pokemon, or Inazuma Eleven, or Mega Man Star Force, or Nintendogs, etc. where the title ships with two or three different versions of the same game. So it doesn't make any sense to separate the Pokemons, etc. when we combine all of the Limited Editions for all of the countless other games in the lists.
It gets trickier when we get into Best Price releases, etc. where the same game is released at a later date than the original release. Generally, we always get separate tracking data for the re-release of a game (Famitsu's 'Famicom Mini: Super Mario Bros.' is the only case where I remember the totals of a re-release being combined with the original release - and in that case it was hard to tell if it was actually a full-fledged new release, or just a new shipment of the same game after a huge delay between shipments).
Combining re-releases with the original releases makes it easy to see how many copies of the game has sold overall, but if they are going to be combined in a chart, then there should be some sort of sidenote or footnote or something in the chart making it clear that multiple releases are being combined, and clearly listing the separate totals for each release that make up the combined total.