February 2015 NPD Thread! 3DS: 395k, PS4: 342k, XBO: 276k, WiiU: 96k

[binary solo]

razeredge said:

binary solo said:
Funny thing is, NPD would still get paid by big companies to track the data even if they published the hardware and top 10 software for free. NPD would say if u don't pay we don't track. And they would pay. And NPD can also copyright their data making re-publication by gaming media something they have to pay for. I think its the paying customers who want to be able to control PR that have demanded tighter non-disclosure conditions so they can control the narrative and spin around how their products are doing.

if so, then why aren't they doing shit in japan?

for example: xbo is an absolute failure in japan. that's horrible pr. why doesn't microsoft do anything in japan to limit public disclosure of data?

 

i think that's a minor part of it, but i think it's much more that they're excessively greedy because of their monopoly situation.

media create faces off against famitsu for clients, so they have an incentive to be more liberal with data disclosure.

but npd is all on its own in usa tracking. we really need someone to step up and be a competitor.

it could be a perfect evolution for vgchartz. instead of relying so much on algorithms, ioi, go sign a deal with the major usa retailers and give them some real competition.

 

maybe then they would start publishing the hardware + top 10 software like they used to.

Because the sales trackers in Japan only aren't doing sales tracking to make money from selling the data to gaming companies and financial institutions. Famitsu and Dengeki are gamer magazines and they publish sales in order to sell their magazine to gamers. Media Create is a sales tracker which wants to make money from selling its sales data, but there it is in competition with gaming magazines that have somewhat reliable independant sales tracking so if MS or any other gaming company put the screws on Media Create to keep the info confidential it would merely diminish Media Create's influence on the game industry sales narrative in the public domain, so it would have no effect at all on the PR/spin game that gaming companies might want to play. So there's no leverage for gaming companies to be able to apply to force sales data to remain under wraps.

If Edge Magazine employed an independant sales tracker and published monthly hardware and top 20 softare sales for the USA, to say the nearest 1,000 for hardware, and that data was routinely within a couple of % of NPD's data, then you can bet your arse that NPD sales + top 20 software would become public domain information in very short order. Indeed if I was runing a gaming magazine I'd employ a sales tracking company for a year to do exactly this and see how their data compares to NPD over that time, and if they are consistently reliable I would then start publishing the information. Or if I was a little bit dishonest I would set up a sales tracking company, do some rudimentary sales tracking but actually just buy NPD's numbers from Aquamarine and then publish them with random minor alterations to numbers (for instance if there is ~2000 sales difference between 2 games that sold 2-300K I would have them swap places with just ~1000 sales difference) to hide the fact that I am merely re-publishing NPD numbers. But I don't run a gaming magazine and I'm not a little bit dishonest.