The NPD Group, the people who publish the hardware and software sales charts over the land of Trump and Clinton, have announced that they will be including sales of digital downloads when the charts are published on the third Thursday of each month.
“This has been several years of beta testing and we’ve been doing this in partnership with publishers, shaping the product, encoding the data the way the industry wants to see it,” explains NPD analyst Liam Callahan. “It’s really at the behest of or on the behalf of the publishers that we’re moving forward with this announcement… Really the goal is to bring a new level of transparency never before seen, at least in the US market.”
The problem is that although EA, Activision, Ubisoft, Capcom, Square Enix, Take-Two, Deep Silver and Warner Bros are on board, others such as Bethesda, and more importantly, Sony and Microsoft are not. Although sales on the PSN and Xbox Live will be tracked, it seems that NPD will be getting the sales figures from EA, Ubisoft etc, rather than from Sony and Microsoft.
Games from publishers that have declined to be involved will still be included in the NPD charts but marked to show their position does not include digital sales. That does imply the charts will be skewed very favourably to those who are sending in digital sales data.
It’s a little be half-arsed to be honest, but is it better than nothing?
Source: GIBiz
tonyyeb
All or nothing otherwise the data is pretty meaningless.
The Lone Steven
Erm…. doesn’t that kinda make the data invalid as it’s not giving accurate readings? Fair enough for the reasoning but surely, to retain(what little, i’ve heard) respect they have, this is a bad move.