Yeah, which also was done by mods here. The point is that you are criticing their professionalism and you have a point, but you need to be wiser about things that are going on and find a better time to criticize. It seems that these NPD people really haven't made up their mind about things, but while this is going on you, choose to criticize them. Bad timing.

This isn't a negotiation. They will never work with a 'rogue' site. No amount of ass kissing is ever going to get NPD to work with this site.

@profdallas:

i think you're over-reacting a bit. it's not like this thread is gonna be the "official" opinion of VGChartz anyway. of course, we hope that NPD will continue to provide hardware and software sales data to the public.

Well, this is all rather priceless.

1. Firstly - the issue of bundling. Once you don't count bundled software at all (explains poor performance of games like Nintendogs?), the entire equation changes. So much software sold these days is bundled. It also seriously disadvantages Sony & MS titles - as its primarily those titles that are bundled.

But its sort of fair - as there is NO extra revenue being handed over for those titles - which is one of the primary measures of overall performance.

In fact - if the industry is RELYING on bundled games to sell hardware - then that does have a significant impact on the bottom line. It also means less (other) software is purchased.

I think it is quite fair, and a good thing for NPD to do.

2. Now - re: Toys R Us:

Even if NPD isn't tracking them this week - they will have reams of data about the past performance of Toys R Us compared to the rest of the market.

At the least, they will extrapolate this out based on past history.

What this may not take into account - is special offers, 2-1 deals (and the like). These 2-1 deals also sort of screw up revenue projections (as do any form of discounting or bundling).

Its interesting though - does this mean NPD is cutting their budget, to reduce costs?

(I wonder how their revenue has gone over the last few months...)

3. Re: Sony - no surprises there. 

I don't see how some of you are coming to the conclusions about NPD vs VGC regarding overtracking xbox.

Remember that VGC matched NPD sales estimates for the Wii and DS more or less. It was primarily 360 and PS3 that was off a little bit. If its true that TRU was not counted and I think most people agree that TRU is heavily skewed to the wii side of the market, then that means BOTH VGC and NPD is off.

It means absolutely nothing about the current 360 overtracking between NPD and VGC. It anything, this just makes everything more confusing because Wii, DS, PS2 were the ones that matched the most often and yet now they're saying, that both NPD and VGC are off on the few system they agreed on.

If they don't have Toys R Us numbers for November they could have a very hard time tracking Mario Galaxy.

NPD have responded:

http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/news/npd-defends-integrity-of-its-video-game-data/18586/

"This month, NPD did not receive data from Toys R Us for the first time," Wilson said. "It appears that mass-market titles on the Wii, DS, and PS2 are underrepresented in the data."

Curious, GameDaily BIZ contacted The NPD Group to get the scoop on what happened to their data this month. Naturally the data trackers at NPD don't feel their results are underrepresenting any particular segment.

"In any given year, we typically add a few retailers and lose one or two," explained Martin Zagorsek, Vice President, Games & Software at The NPD Group. "This year both the adds (e.g. amazon.com) and the losses (Toys R Us) were a bit larger than usual, but overall our market coverage has not changed very much compared to last year."

He added, "Also, since the retailers we've added are actually increasing in importance and share, we feel that our data accuracy may improve rather than deteriorate due to these changes."

NPD's data is generally based on reporting from around 60 to 65 percent of retailers in the U.S., so the removal of one chain such as Toys R Us is not likely major so long as solid replacements (like Amazon) are added. As Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter says in his reports, "While we cannot be certain that the NPD games data is accurate, we believe that the data provides a relevant benchmark for tracking U.S. retail sell-through."

ProfDallas - have you seen the flaming and threatening e-mails NPD sends to us? Not to sound childish, but they kind of started it themselves.

No wonder NPDs data has seemed off. They've been using Amazon!

Don't forget about "Jasmine."

Burning bridges, roffle. No one's going to kiss NPD's ass when they troll this site on a regular basis.