Wall Street analysts comments on the NPD v VGChartz debate

[Sri Lumpa]

ioi said:

Well without making the situation worse, the reason VGC and NPD aren't, it seems, able to get on is because NPD hate our very existence and are trying to do everything possible (meister is from NPD) to discredit us with the same old tired and inaccurate lies time after time.

The animosity is definitely one-way and is for one reason - because we are doing a good job and they see us as competition, despite the fact we are neither trying nor succeeding in competing directly - we offer a very different service as the writer of this article perfectly sums up and the guys commenting miss as always.

That's exactly what NPD is afraid of. You are succeeding because you are disrupting them.

Had you started trying to sell your numbers to the gaming industry two years ago you would have been laughed at and gone nowhere, but by catering to us who were underserved when it comes to sales data (except in Japan), even your "crummy"* numbers were better than the lack of numbers we had before.

Of course since then your accuracy has gone up and you have moved upstream and are now competing with NPD on a higher tier and I would expect that in a few years you will be as well regarded as them as regard accuracy, and better regarded than them as regard service (weekly data, more transparent corrections and even the forums as there regularly are interesting insights there though amid a lot of drivel).

So felicitations on successfully (so far) disrupting a business model that had a seemingly overwhelming barrier to entry and good luck in continuing to do so.

* I don't mean it in a bad way, if you have read either Malstrom's Wii disruption articles or Clayton Christensen's disruption books you will understand the meaning of the word in this context.