US: Zelda BOTW and MK8 managed to chart in the top 20 best-selling games of the decade(physical+digital) without digital sales number

[The_Liquid_Laser]

Barkley said:

The_Liquid_Laser said:

Nice Ad Hominem.

Your post actually does not address what I'm saying.  For example you said, "For PUBG the NPD are not given digital pc sales figures for this particular game, which is it's biggest platform."  But other games do include PC sales.  This is one of the many reasons why the list is bogus.

They include all data that they are given access to. This is not "massaging data" this is presenting the data they have. So you're saying because a particular publisher doesn't give them digital sales data they shouldn't bother posting the list at all?

The reason PUBG isn't higher on the list is because the publisher doesn't tell NPD it's sales. The reason Nintendo isn't higher on the list is because they don't tell NPD their digital sales. This isn't NPD's fault or NPD massaging the data to put their favorites at the top.

Their is literally nothing NPD can do about that, it's up to the publishers like Nintendo.

It's poor analysis.  A better list would only include physical sales.  Then you'd be comparing apples to apples.  A list where some of the games have all physical+digital sales and other games only have some or none of the digital sales is a poor list.

It's like holding a marathon, and then when the race starts some of the people bring bikes.  The bikers say, "should we be punished just because they didn't bring bikes?"  So the people holding the race let them use bikes and the others run.  That's not a fair race.  This list given in the OP is not a fair list and really none of the NPD lists are fair anymore.  Some of the games include all physical and digital sales and some don't.

Also, yes the NPD does "massage" the data.  They used to be a lot more transparent, giving both hardware and software numbers, and they also used to report each game on their lists as a separate SKU.  The format started changing once Wii games were filling up the monthly top 10.  The bias is obvious, because they started combining third party SKU's, but they never combined the Pokemon SKU's.  It was a move to make third party companies look better.  The NPD is a business and some of their clients are large Western publishers.  They definitely have a financial incentive to "massage" the data.