NPD will start tracking digital sales (July NPD delayed one week)

[Azuren]

Aquamarine said:

Ruler said:
how does that work? they need to estimate the numbers like VGchartz

Kinda. NPD / EEDAR / DFC Intelligence / GfK / other research groups get direct digital data from EA, Activision, Ubisoft, Capcom, Square Enix, Take-Two, Deep Silver and Warner Bros every month. They're all linked to each other (aka. they all use / share the same data).

Everything else they do about digital sales beyond that are just estimates based off of their existing hard data, algorithms, and conversations with publishers.

 

 

I still think this digital data is going to be bad for us.

NPD is going to release a combined digital-physical chart every month, so the Top 10 ranking is now useless because they don't have digital data from smaller publishers, some exceptions like Bethesda, and 1st-party data. We're losing that accuracy that we had before in the Top 10.

And, they're getting rid of platform rankings as well in their PR report.

And I still don't think anyone but the major publishers will actually have access to this data day-one. So that means no digital leaks because the leakers won't have access to it, more obfuscated PR data, a week long delay in data release...just seems like we're getting shafted at every level here.

Not having the digital sales doesn't improve accuracy, though.