While a lot of people rely on NPD’s monthly sales reports to know which console is winning and which game is being bought the most, it suffered from one big problem: it didn’t account for digital game sales, which was getting more and more significant for all platforms.
That’s about to change now, though. NPD has confirmed that it will start tracking digital game sales in the U.S. starting this month! Unfortunately, it’s limited to a handful of publishers who signed up for it, but seeing as it includes EA, Activision, Blizzard, Capcom, Deep Silver, Square Enix, Take-Two, Warner Bros. and Ubisoft, it should be good enough for most. And yes, NPD is in the process of getting more publishers into the list, which we hope will include PlayStation soon.
The digital game sales data will be tracked from the PlayStation Network, Xbox Live and PC. However, it seems it won’t be complete, as EA’s digital PC sales, Ubisoft’s UPlay and Blizzard’s Battle.net won’t be included.
NPD Group Toys and Games boss Joanne Hageman had this to say regarding this much-needed update to NPD’s monthly software sales report:
As has been experienced across a wide variety of industries, digital has made a big impact on the overall gaming market, and we’ve risen to meet the demand for a reporting mechanism that tracks those sales in a timely and accurate way.
With the participation and support of leading publishers – whose cooperation makes this possible – we are excited to launch an industry-first service that addresses a long-standing need.
While digital gaming has exploded in the past several years, physical gaming sales, including hardware and accessories, have a major presence in this industry…With a more complete picture, participants are able to make better business decisions with a broader set of data.
While NPD’s digital game sales tracking is only for the U.S. for now, GfK and SuperData will collaborate to release a combined physical and digital game sales chart in the UK.
You can check out an in-depth chat with NPD on how the company managed to convince publishers to sign up, and more right here.
[Source: MCVUK]
