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.
