ZhugeEX said:
I'd make a note though that some of the old data is very unreliable and has been adjusted in later years. |
Please note that a lot of NPD sales "adjustments" over the years have actually come from people who were NOT part of The NPD Group, but instead were just regular people who thought that NPD was inaccurate so they have to "fix" their numbers.
That's why I think presenting the original data as-is will always be relevant. Old sales data is a relic and it's important to have a window into how people back in the day experienced it.
The problem with sales data on the Internet is that it gets passed through so many hands such that when the original source is a bit questionable, misinformation can spread for decades and nobody is really there to correct it.
Shadow1980 said:
Well, it is 2016, so I figured everything would have made its way to the internet by now in some form or another. There's been sales discussions on GAF and elsewhere going back many years, after all. I had no idea most of the old data was still on paper and apparently scarce enough and buried in reams of offline content to where they just haven't made it to us yet. I guess that does explain why older data has proven so hard to come by in my years-long search for hardware numbers. |
Again, the problem with NPD is that video game sales tracking is a ridiculously niche subset of sales tracking.
There are two reasons for that:
1) Video games are a boom-and-bust business. It was a lot smaller back in the 1980's and 1990's, and trends from that era have all but vanished. So companies don't care in the slightest about how old genres or old platforms have sold because it is considered a relic of a bygone time.
In contrast, old box office sales numbers are much better preserved because cinema has stayed pretty much the same for 60 years, so how a franchise sold back in the 1980's or 1990's is still relevant today after you adjust for inflation and market size.
2) There are so few subscribers to NPD's video game tracking service that NPD doesn't give video games the same sort of care as they would one of their more popular services. After all, The NPD Group is a business. They're going to follow growth opportunities...and taking the time and effort to dig up and preserve super-old sales numbers just isn't worth the opportunity cost when none of their clients would care about the numbers (and nobody new would subscribe to them).
It's really sad to see sales data slowly fade away on pieces of paper in dusty archives, but what can you do? Time ticks on and honestly, most people only care about sales data to use as ammo in their console wars online. The niche who truly care about sales data is just so small that even if you were to dedicate lots of time and energy to it, it's largely thankless as a very, very tiny population would be the only ones who care about it.
I've gone through tremendous effort to archive an incredible amount of extremely rare, super-old NPD data in the past. Hundreds and hundreds of hours of transcription off of paper. And only a few people have thanked me for it.
Honestly, it's just better to put time and effort into something you love and something that lots of people will appreciate. For me, that's writing and directing and managing a production company. That's where I really feel like I can change the world.
