BD vs DVD -- Is it a lie to present market share in terms of revenue?

[RVDondaPC]

To say that using revenue as a measure of marketshare is stupid is very ignorant. Marketshare is used to try and determine a demand for a certain product in an industry. If you understand economics you would know that there is a demand curve. The higher the price the less the demand along a demand curve. However it is very possible that a product may be selling less at a higher price at a given point in the products life but has a demand curve that is greater(more shifted to the right) than the demand curve of a product that is selling more at a lower price point. The only way to try and determine who's demand curve is greater is by the measurement of revenue produced by those products. Raw sales numbers would tell you very little if the two prices are dramatically different(10% or higher difference).

The reason raw numbers are used in the video game industry is because the number of consoles sold is an indication of how many people can buy a video game on a particular console. And that is the type of information that is important to a publisher of video games. Measuring revenue may be important for the actual console makers but to outside companies, raw numbers are more important because that indicates how many people they can sale their products to.

As for the market share of those actual product, software sales, raw numbers are used because in general in the video game industry most video games have been retailed at the same price and would usually see a similar price decrease over time thus revenue and raw numbers would be at pretty equal ratios. However this may not be true anymore as wii games are cheaper than HD games. It would make sense now that video games should be tracked in terms of revenue to get and understanding of the actual demand curves which is the best way of determining demand for a product not just how many total sales it's had while ignoring price. The only problem with this is it may be too hard to determine which games are sold at which price because of all the different sales and coupons and discounts given out on software sales from retailers. And therefore raw numbers will continue to be used for trying to measuring software demand though using revenue would be a much more accurate measurement.