Every entertainment medium has fanboys and fans who care about their idols or favorite product, but the only entertainment medium where I see that a lotof people care about sales is in the gaming industry. For example, you don't see Madonna fans saying that Lady gaga sucks because madonna has more money or more sales, or you don't see Cleveland fans saying that Lebron sells more tickets and Jerseys than kobe, so kobe sucks. They use the product or idol to fight "Lady gaga sings better or is more creative than Madonna" "Lebron is better right now, kobe is too old" "Inception is an amazing movie!, better than Avatar!! (avatar sold more)" etc. So why sales are so important to gamers? why gamers are so proud about sales?

This is a charts website so I'm not specifically talking about vgchartz, just in general.

Edit: why we use sales to fight? that's the real point of the thread. 

Because sales are more relevant in video games than any other business, and video gaming breeds brand loyalty more than any other industry.

The amount of sales a system gets is an important factor in what type of support it'll get in the games industry, but in for example movies, sales doesn't really matter at all to the consumer, you'll be able to watch every movie you want pretty much, regardless of how well it performs.

Because sells will dictate whether we will see another release in a given series. Lady gaga fucks up and not that much of a biggie. She will be given multiple chances before the plug is pulled on her.

It's usually gamer dignity and bragging rights. Usually if a game sells well, it's popular. Everyone wants to be in the popular crowd and before you know it , things go full circle. I don't find anything in it, they're just numbers to me. Then again, they aren't just numbers to the company that makes the game. So people feel if the game doesn't sell well then sequentially, it isn't popular. It's about popularity and survival, just like life.

If your system doesn't sell this could mean no support from external developers (I'm more into third parties than first parties). If a game that you like doesn't sell would probably mean that there won't be any sequel. Those are the 2 primary reasons why I care about sales.

Because of Console Wars.  I mean, are we more concerned with PC sales or Console sales?  Is it PS4 vs Xbone or is it PS4 vs PC?  Most of us grew up on consoles games and caring about the character in the game.  PCs would have been more relevant for gamers if it were a stand alone plug and play console, but it was more complicated than that growing up.  As for movies, they're 90 minutes long on average.  You watch them and the movie just continue to play.  Games we're more interactive, we can change the outcome of the game to some degree. 

Music again is a linear platform like movies. 

Because selling more is winning.

Video game fans are more hostile toward each other than other people it seems. And people like calling doom about hardware and software they don't like or like but don't have.

Because this is an expensive industry to be in. If something doesn't sell, then it could easily mean doom for the developer/publisher. We have seen this time and time again. It all goes back to sales.

I've seen people care as much as sales of videogames as they care for box office numbers and sales of music albums.

It really depends on what you're looking for you'll find people as passionate for sales of everything.