In an industry built on spectacle, the video game business has long known how to make numbers perform before the games themselves do. At Gamescom in Cologne this August, analysts gathered to name what publishers rarely will: that wishlists, player counts, and pre-order figures are chosen not to illuminate performance, but to flatter it. Understanding which metrics carry genuine meaning — and why certain ones are offered in place of others — is, in the end, a quiet act of literacy in a world designed to dazzle.