| Aquamarine said: Remember, I'm not a leaker. I gave up leaking a long time ago when NPD's old management bullied me to no end. Every data point I reveal is sanctioned by The NPD Group, and in general they don't like me revealing LTDs. Why? It's simple-----LTDs are a much more relevant gauge of success in the retail market than one-month sales. Therefore, they're much more important to NPD clients. In general, The NPD Group does not allow me to share data that would materially impact their business. That means I can't share so much that clients would no longer invest in their datasets. In that sense, LTDs for larger multiplats are tolerable because many of the multiplat publishers really don't care all that much (for example, GTA V LTD is currently 17.784 million in the USA excluding bundles). However, LTDs for exclusives and smaller titles are much more touchy. For example, Quantum Break's failure in the market reflects really poorly on Microsoft and creates this "Xbox is doomed!" narrative......but the failure of a big multiplat like Battleborn wouldn't create that same sort of drama. And smaller publishers don't tend to like it because a lot of the niche ones have large digital shares...so if something only sold 30K at retail LTD it could have sold like >100K digitally...which for a niche publisher is the difference between a flop and a success. In that sense, retail is inherently misleading. Although keep in mind, Creamsugar often focuses primarily on exclusives and does yearly 2014 and 2015 updates. For example, we got updates in December 2015 for many of those titles you listed. That's the difference....Creamsugar is an unsanctioned leaker who pisses the administration off....I'm trying to stay within the rules and reach a happy compromise so we can have data. If you apply basic conjecture using the #10 sales figure that I usually reveal you can easily get to an approximate LTD (or at the very least, a maximum range) from those December 2015 data points. Catalog sales are rather predictable from month to month...you can approximate them quite nicely. I'll have to re-negotiate with them if I want to share lots of LTDs with you guys. We'll see how it goes. |
Does NPD have issue with you posting total software splits for a month? Like a breakdown of all total software sold per month by platform, like 50% PS4, 40% Xbox One, and 10% Wii U or whatnot?
I was just interested in trends regarding software splits across the platforms, but I could see NPD could possibly take issue with this even though it's rather broad.
If you can't give specific percents, would you be allowed to discuss any overall trends you notice in software splits YoY or MoM?
