I just went to Eurogamer and i was reading a article about the pre-orders for the PSV in japan and how they are favouring the 3G enabled version. Some pre-order figures revealed also point towards gamers not picking up much games, and many of them buying 32gb sd cards. 

My assumption here is that PSV will have a greater % of its software sales through digial downloads. So when tracking software sales from VGChartz perspective or any other tracking group, how important will those figures be? PSV might have lucklustre sales reported in Japan but might have great sales digitally.

We see this happening with Steam sales as well.

So what are your thought on this issue going forward, as digital downloads become more prominent and more important. 

Heres a link to the article i read: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-10-17-japan-vita-pre-orders-prefer-3g-version

I like to ignore this site's impeeding doom...

VGchartz will become Gamefaqs X!

I'm sure they will eventually find a way to track Digital Sales of games.

They've done it before. Remember the WiiWare and XBL Arcade charts back in the day? I loved those features.

But yes, I'm sure Brett is looking towards the future and what that means for VGChartz. I can't wait to see what he comes up with next. ^_^

Yeah i get what you saying, i wasnt arguing against that or anything. The article just made me think about digital distribution and how it is becomming more prominent. And it is becomming more prominent. 

I look at the PSV and how Sony is positioning it as a divice which can be supported fully digitally. Theres no need to be buying physical copies of games on the PSV. COnsidering also that the prices are now substantially cheaper, sony is clearly pushing for it. So in comparison to say the psp i think their will definately be more software sold digitally than before.

In my opinion, i too think that digital distribution is a few years out, but each year it becomes more significant. I think its gonna be interesting to see how VGChartz deals with that. Im all for physical copies

WE use to track WiiWare and XBl arcade sales??? Must have been before my time  

Howd they use to do that though :?

This is what I hope to see in the future. Just put estimated digital sales next to lifetime totals

They could get these from the most recent sales reports by gaming companies, or by looking at digital sales on various websites very often. It just astonishes me how other forms of media can get tracked so well, yet game sales tracking both physical and digital lag so far behind.

There's still plenty of need, considering the lack of good internal storage on the Vita. With the physical games, you can store saves on the card and also updates/patches. Otherwise, you'd need to buy Sony's memory cards, which plenty of people have complained about being expensive.

Two examples:
http://www.vgchartz.com/article/3416/channel-surfing-virtual-consolewiiware-sales-chart-march-2009/
http://www.vgchartz.com/article/2957/xbla-sales-chart-2109-2709/

DKII put together the worldwide Wiiware charts, benkenobi the xbla analysis. Two of the more famous members of the early days, you probably remember them.

DKII is Keith Jackson, benkenobi is Benjamin Schlichter, today they run their own sales analysis company: http://fadellc.com/About%20Us.html

I contributed among others to Keith's Wiiware charts, for more than a year I checked the weekly German Wiiware data and forwarded them to TWRoO who sent all the European data to DKII.