Azuren said:
Aquamarine said:
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.
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Not having the digital sales doesn't improve accuracy, though.
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In my opinion it's better to have a public Top 10 where you can trust that #1 was the #1 best seller in physical sales.......than this weird combined physical+digital Top 10 where you can't trust the rankings because NPD doesn't track digital for 1st-party, Bethesda, and many others.
Obviously it's better for those in the know to have physical + digital wherever possible. But for the public, you guys are getting screwed when NPD releases their PR.
