How The Hell Do We Fix The Broken Video Game Charts?

By Ian Dransfield on 24 Apr 2015 at 7:18PM

We got the article that discuss how mess the UK software chart is

"But because Chart Track is unable to take digital sales into account, the lineup we see in the top 40 rarely represents what people are actually playing these days. "According to these charts," Dring said, "League of Legends and DOTA 2 do not exist, Minecraft - which I think many will agree is probably the biggest game in the world right now - has only been No.1 a handful of times back in the summer of 2013, and nobody ever plays games on PC (except when Football Manager comes out)."-kotaku-

It looks like the problem in tracking the digital sales, and also a lot of indie games are coming in will make worse if the people behind this let this thing slip away.But it seems many people or user doesn't care because very less people trust the chart, but i am really curious does VG Chart use the chart as part of data on weakly chart?

"But those digital charts aren't seen as the main representative of the market. That honor still lies with Chart Track and NPD listings for the UK and US, respectively. And those charts suffer because of the lack of digital data, says Dring: "The industry seems smaller because we don’t track the figures, while publishers and developers only have their internal insight into knowing which business models to use, which platforms to release games on and what genres to develop titles with.”-kotaku-

http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2015/04/24/so-how-the-hell-do-we-fix-the-charts

so what is your though  guys/girls?

It is true for PC but...

Consoles digital is somewhere between 10-20% yet... 20% is being very optimists.

" What this means is that PC games rarely factor in the charts at all, as boxed sales now accounts for only a teensy proportion of PC games sales. So there can be a game that millions of people playing, like DayZ or DOTA or Cities XL, and it doesn’t feature in the charts at all. " -quote

The problem as I see it..... League of legends is free 2 play.
How do you track something thats a free download? Does it even belong in a sales chart (if you could)?

For non free to play games.... yeah a way to track digital sales would be nice, and these should be factored in with sales charts... but again how would you go about doing so?

"....as Dring points out, the big digital retailers - Steam, PSN, Xbox Live, the Nintendo eShop - don't share their numbers,..."

^ this is the issue.

Yeah, it obviously creates a false representation of what the market is really like. People here scoff at free-to-play games while League of Legends brings in $600 million in revenue in 2014--and it wasn't even the top grossing FTP title. Pretending that it somehow doesn't count because those weren't direct software sales seems kind of silly.

Still, as long as it completely depends on self-reporting, there is only so much that can be done.

The issue is how valuable all the digital data is (as well as hiding bad news) meaning they wont want to release the data.

In adding free 2 play you also have the issue of how? Do it by revenue? All those Indies suddenly need to sell 3-10x as many units as AAA and full price retail.

Are the charts to track volume or revenue in such a case?

One thing is for sure. Software charts are going to become increasingly irrelevant.

Huh?  Who cares about game sales, then?  Why is one slice of the pie more important than the others?  Of course I'd love to know how well DLC and microtransactions are doing.  I want to know it all.  It's all part of the industry.  More importantly, it's all part of how the industry is changing, which makes it even more important to understand.

I guess you don't know but they're able to do sub charts now.  Technology is crazy.

Look, I get that you only care about one thing but you're hardly everyone and your "more important" is bull.  Revenue is more important than units sold.  That's kind of the point of the OP and why only looking at initial game sales is part of the picture.  It's not about keeping your charts orderly and simple, it's about understanding where the industry is heading and why.

It depends on the purpose of the charts. The Chart Track ones are actually about volume rather than revenue. It's meant to represent what is the "most popular" with the general public.

This is why Minecraft Xbox Edition etc frequently charted even though it's only a quarter of the price of a regular game.

So in that regard, 1000 people spending £1000 on boosters etc on a F2P game wouldn't have the same impact. I guess you could try to do it on number of downloads, however, if it's the same person buying a pack many many times, it's still not representative in the same way.