Video Game Sales Thread

[darkknightkryta]

Was someone going to work on an app pr something to track Amazon?

I don't think you understand how apps work...

[Mmm_fish_tacos]

I don't think you understand how apps work...

No its not that. We've talked about an amazon tracker before. I didn't know of anyone was actually going to make it.

[DD_Bwest]

No its not that. We've talked about an amazon tracker before. I didn't know of anyone was actually going to make it.

yea we sorta talked about it, but it would heavily math dependent on legend, and hes busy with the game lol  it would be alot of work to put the thing together

[the-pi-guy]

Yeah, Legend was talking about it a few months ago. 
I thought he said he was working on it at some point, and maybe he was? 
But it looks like he volunteered me and Etho. 

I think what we could do:
Get information from amazon + gamestop and others and put it in comparison to any and all release numbers.
Then extrapolate sales estimates, perhaps with ranges.   

[ethomaz]

I don't think you understand how apps work...

We had the ideia to create a servers app that tracks hour by hour the changed of the Amazon Ranking positions... well to be fair is just to take the hour racking and see if there are change in the position and store the data into a database.

After that we can work with some graphs and tools to shows this data in a fashion way.

Read the Amazon site and store the data is the easy part

[Max King of the Wild]

The order standard edition #107, about to hit top 100, and quite ahead of Evolve despite there being a hype-beta for it. And despite being split into two SKUs! And coming out 2 weeks later!

with the story trailer... This should silence the critics and hype the game because it's fudgy awesome. I expect a jump in standings

[Rorono]

^True dat.

[darkknightkryta]

Again, I don't think anyone understands how apps work.  You can't just scrape web data.  You'd have to get a hold of Amazon's api and have it spit out some kind of parseable data.  From there it's easy as... pie

[the-pi-guy]

Again, I don't think anyone understands how apps work.  You can't just scrape web data.  You'd have to get a hold of Amazon's api and have it spit out some kind of parseable data.  From there it's easy as... pie

What do you mean? 
I found some code to help. 

Code Select Expand


import java.io.*;
import java.net.*;

public class test3 {
public static void main(String args[]){

try {
String webPage = "http://www.amazon.com/best-sellers-video-games/zgbs/videogames/ref=pd_dp_ts_vg_1";
URL url = new URL(webPage);
URLConnection urlConnection = url.openConnection();
InputStream is = urlConnection.getInputStream();
InputStreamReader isr = new InputStreamReader(is);

int numCharsRead;
char[] charArray = new char[1024];
StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
while ((numCharsRead = isr.read(charArray)) > 0) {
sb.append(charArray, 0, numCharsRead);
}
String result = sb.toString();

System.out.println("*** BEGIN ***");
System.out.println(result);
System.out.println("*** END ***");
} catch (MalformedURLException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}


}
}


This shows everything on the amazon best seller page. 
The "difficulty" would be to take out all the worthless information. 
And that might not be an issue at all. 
Even if we can't make easy steps to remove the useless information, so long as amazon is consistent, it wouldn't be difficult at all to make something pick out the information. 

[Legend]

Again, I don't think anyone understands how apps work.  You can't just scrape web data.  You'd have to get a hold of Amazon's api and have it spit out some kind of parseable data.  From there it's easy as... pie

You can import the actual webpage itself and then parse the html.

@the idea
Yeah I have no time to work on it, besides just giving input. The math thing I was saying was that instead of just kinda guessing the space between positions, we could calculate the highest probable value by combining different charts.


Also:

http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/ebf9r4/the-final-bosman-number-one-best-seller

[darkknightkryta]

What do you mean? 
I found some code to help. 

This shows everything on the amazon best seller page. 
The "difficulty" would be to take out all the worthless information. 
And that might not be an issue at all. 
Even if we can't make easy steps to remove the useless information, so long as amazon is consistent, it wouldn't be difficult at all to make something pick out the information. 

Never mind, I found it.

[darkknightkryta]

What do you want the app to actually do?

[the-pi-guy]

Looking at it, parsing it shouldn't be too difficult at all. 
The hard part though as Etho alluded to would be doing stuff with the information. 

[the-pi-guy]

What do you want the app to actually do?

This

I'd really like to set up a program to watch the charts and record everything. Then by comparing hourly, weekly, monthly, and yearly charts you could get a very accurate system for knowing how much an item is selling.

Get amazon rankings + others   -> Done, but it should probably be done in a different language. 
Parse for rankings -> easy-ish. 
The next part is the difficult part. 

[darkknightkryta]

This
Get amazon rankings + others   -> Done, but it should probably be done in a different language. 
Parse for rankings -> easy-ish. 
The next part is the difficult part. 

Yeah what Legend is asking is a server client to record the data that's running 24/7.