I was thinking, since all PS4 and Xbone games will (also) be available digitally (Xbone physical games having pretty much no difference with their digital counterparts), tracking videogame sales of retail copies becomes a rather incomplete endeavor to the point of (almost) becoming irrelevant. Purchase of digital games will keep increasing. I would speculate the retail-digital split for Xbone games would be about 60%-40% at its peak, PS4 certainly lower but it will also grow in popularity. By the end of next gen I could see digital purchases being on par with retail sales across both platforms.

 Retail trackers like the NPD, GFK Chart-track and VGchartz among many others will start to see their numbers become irrelevant as this generation progresses, and I doubt they will be of much use for software tracking by the end of it.

They won't be useless, they just need to make appropriate changes in how they collect data, and simply start gathering digital sales as well, this may be a problem, since they did not start doing it this gen, and digital is already pretty big in case of handhelds. Guess we'll have to see.

Yes, it's sad. I hate digital downloads for this reason (other reasons too).

Luckily ioi (site owner) is adapting his business and creating new gaming web-sites and stuff.

To be honest.. I think ioi already saw this coming a few years back and thats why he started gamewise., the site doesn't have the money and resources to also try to track digital sales..

Why useless? NPD and GFK already said they will track digital sales

NPD already do that... just not show numbers.

If only there was a way for Sony and Microsoft to sell the console digitally.

with sony saying 60% of vita's sales are digital i think the integrity of software tracking is already questionable.

..as other have said - there is a reason ioi made gamewise.

I doubt MS, Sony or Nintendo are going to report their sales to anyone but investors when it comes to digital sales. At least not on the level we get retail sales information. They don't need to pay other companies for sales data when they are able to track all digital sales themselves.

They're already pretty useless. Like kitler pointed out, Sony said something like 60% of all games sales on Vita are digital, with the average Vita owner owning ~10 games.

They are not useless, just have to take everything into account when thinking about this stuff. Unfortunately some people may not be able to do that.