I don't know if this has already been brought up. I also am not sure if this deserves its own tread. I think it does because of how important the issue is, but it's been on the website developement thread for 5 hours with no response, so I'll make one here.

How does VGC plan to address digital sales?

Seriously. Like, I get that some people don't like digital, but it's important and an impossible to ignore part of gaming sales now. I was thinking about how ancient Gamestop is for not evolving with the expanding digital ecosystem, but isn't VGC sort of in the same boat?

I look at the sales of games on the site, and absolutely none of them from the 7th gen onwards can be considered accurate because we don't factor digital sales. I looked at P4G selling 99K and it's impossible to ignore the potential thousands of sales not being accounted for because we currently pretend that digital sales don't exist. I look at the fact that Steam, a platform with 125m+ current active users, has absolutely no sales representation on this site whatsoever, and I scratch my head. I look at how there's no way to track the sales of DLC, and I think about how forward thinking it would be for a site like us to track that sort of stuff. I think about how 99% of indie games are unrepresented on the site because they're digital only. This, in my humble opinion, is a gaping problem for the website, and probably the biggest one for VGC going forward. The issue is massive.

I'm not ignoring the difficulties behind getting these numbers, or even the chance that it may be highly improbable and even impossible for a site like VGC to ever be able to track digital sales, but if this pertains, no matter how good the intentions behind this site are, the whole "sales tracking" focus of the site has a hard, tangible, and very near expiration date. Maybe that means shifting the marketed focus from sales tracking to sales analyzing, but the current method of flat out ignoring digital when it's an ever rising important factor in gaming sales is disingenuous and honesly behind the times. And there is no compromise. You're either tracking digital sales the way you track physical sales, along side physical sales, or you're out of touch. Writing the odd article about digital sales doesn't cut it.

I don't know how VGC plans to change in the wake of an ever expanding digital gaming ecosystem, but it needs to start that change ASAP. Either figure out how to track digital sales with the same gusto that we track physical sales, change the focus from tracking to analyzing, or do something else brilliant that I could never think of. But if VCG keeps on this route of simply pretending it doesn't exist, it's going to seriously become irrelevant. Companies don't consider digital sales unimportant. Neither should we.

Dude, this site can't even give us physical sales, and you're asking them to give us digital sales?

For Steam you can use SteamSpy. Heck, it's more accurate than VGC as well, and it is always up to date.

In a perfect world, we'd have both.

You're suggesting that, instead of modernizing the site, VGC should instead shove people away to what is essentially a competing site? I have a little more passion for VGC than that. VGC should be trying to out do them.

The entirety of everything VGChartz is very outdated at this point, and I'm not even talking about the numbers. Part of me doesn't even care about the sales anymore, the important thing to me now is the forum. But regardless, I honestly think this website needs a reboot of some sort. They'd make the website better, find better methods of tracking info on the site, collect digital sales info, and focus on getting that info up on time. They could wipe a clean slate for themselves. But that's just a dream.

Nope, I'm suggesting that you come to terms with this idea not coming in to fruition. I'd love for VGC to both have way more accurate tracking and  digital tracking, but neither of those seem likely at all to happen. I mean, most sales discussion on this site now is based on NPD and Media Create, and quarterly reports, because VGC is so inconsistent at giving numbers, and when they do come, they're hardly reliable regardless.

Steamspy is interesting though. The whole thing is done algorithmically and for free. I wonder if the same sort of thing can be done for consoles...

Steamspy might be an important site to look at. If VGC can do the same thing with all platforms, digital sales could be updated so frequently that it would be basically daily. And since it would be all algorithmic, it wouldn't suffer the same gaps we have with physical sales now.

I think that there is a lot going on behind the scenes that we don't know about, and I think that VGC is clearly making strides to improve. When I stop seeing those strides, I'll stop suggesting improvements. Until then, I don't think they'll necessarily fall on deaf ears.

If I saw that thread, I would have defended the ever-loving-fuck out of you. You were absolutely in the right.

I don't like the idea of halting the progression of everything to fix one thing. Physical sales tracking won't matter if the site becomes irrelevant for not tracking digital and, as Steam Spy proves, if done right, to only work that would need to be done it tweaking the algorythm to be more accurate as opposed to physical sales that must be manually updated. Steam Spy updates on it's own, and daily. That's more frequently than VGC will ever hope to achieve with physical sales, and with less week-to-week work, if any.

At this point there's barely even any physical sales data anymore.