Daaaamn .. I thought it'd be like a $50 sub max ... 5 figures is insane ..

I think their only subscribers are related parties (primarily game publishers), which is why their costs are so damn hihg.

Now if they were open to be subscribed to by the public, I'm sure price would come down to something a little more reasonable

its 10K a year

See, PS3 hardware was never unprofitable, it was just the damned cost of NPD. EA have never wasted money, nor Take Two, it's all NPD's fault :)

good riddance. Now i dont have to listen to people moaning because vgchartz Americas numbers are not the same as NPD north america numbers.

Feel sorry for the companys that pay 10k just to find out their game sold like shit ... that must hurt.

No doubt, but they also get to see how their competitors are selling (NPD estimates dollar sales based on pricing at different stores), how each of the hardware SKUs is selling, and analyses of what these numbers mean.

Now granted, in the movie industry you can get all that shit for free....

No publisher really cares what their game sold to the end consumer. They already know exactly how many copies they shipped, and once those discs are out the door the cash is in their hand.

The publishers use the NPD numbers to gauge market interests and market size. Like, do FPSs sell on the DS? Do platformers thrive on the XBox? That sort of thing.

This news makes me worried about the "correctness" of future sales numbers from VGChartz, looking at the many adjustments they used to make to their numbers each month (after the release of the monthly NPD numbers).

It's Densha Otoko! (literally: Train Man), basically your standard nerd-gets-hot-chick story, while still being charming as hell. He has a cadre of online friends whom he constantly chats with, updating them on his exploits. The gif is them all anticipating... something. I forget the exact scene