Software publishers association sales data programs: Methodologies, coverage and assumptions

The Software Publishers Association Research Department focuses its sales research efforts on tracking sales of packaged application software written for the desktop personal computer industry. Quarterly summaries of the data we collect are issued to the public in the form of sales press releases. Our goal in this article is to clarify the types of information we collect, the sources used, and the adjustments performed on the data available to the public. At the end of this article we discuss the software piracy loss estimation methodology.