Major changes are coming to the industry’s go-to resource for sales figures. The NPD Group has announced some sweeping changes, effective immediately with the release of the financial data of the month of September. Representatives from the group have stated that the changes were “implemented in order to address the changing sales landscape as well as updates to NPD’s corporate publishing policies.”
The changes include:
- Removal of monthly hardware unit sales figures
- A shift in the Top 10 software from sku level with unit sales for the Top 5, to Top 10 software at the title level with no unit sales
- Revised footnote explaining that the monthly retail data reflects new physical purchases, not total consumer spend (digital, subscriptions, mobile games, rentals, used or social network games). The NPD Group will release a total consumer spend report to press on a quarterly basis
- Monthly analysis from NPD industry analyst, Anita Frazier, will include software sales figures at both the sku and title level for various new releases
Bad NPD, Bad. I want to know how many units of a game sold on each console; not for fanboyism, but to know how many units were sold. It is bad enough that you don’t track PC sales, which leads to people saying that PC gaming is dead; now you go and not list any sales numbers what-so-ever, and any hardware sales.
NPD, what you should really do is track all sales of Downloadable games on PC, XBLA, PSN, and NintendoWare so the gaming world truly knows how many units were sold. Thank you.