That’s the question! I genuinely do not understand why so if anyone could answer this, I’d be grateful :)

ps I’m sorry if this is a really dim question! I’m sure the answer is already out there but I can’t find it and I am interested.

Do you mean on NPD lists?

Or on their cumative software sales reports ? On cumulative sales reports they do include digital sales, just not games that are not released physically 

On their quarter reports they do release numbers including digital sales, the only games excluded are the digital ones only.

And I'd imagine the digital only ones don't sell enough to bother mentioning sales results, from their perspective. If they had better sales then there would probably have been a physical version.

Im sure there are a bunch of digital only games that have sold well.

Among us comes to mind immediately.

My take: The NPD has never really been fair to Nintendo, so they choose not to share data with them. A lot of NPD's customers seem to be Western 3rd party companies that do not like getting upstaged in the sales charts by Nintendo. So you can see how NPD massages the data by doing things like combining all SKUs when reporting where a particular game ranks (i.e. combining all platforms). At the same time they don't combine Pokemon SKUs like Sword and Shield. They do things like this to make Western third party games seem more successful than they really are, especially compared to NIntendo games.

They do, they just don't share the figures with other companies (such as NPD)

When Nintendo says MK8D sold 37 million units, it includes digital. When NPD says MK8D is the 7th best selling game of the year, it doesn't include digital.

No idea, Kind of annoying. It's another quirky thing that Nintendo as a company does.

Only two companies I know that don't is Nintendo and Take Two. EA, Ubisoft, Warner Bros, Activision, Sony, Microsoft, Capcom, Sega... basically everyone shares this data except them.

Because gamers pay them with digital money, and Ninty shareholders and execs don't like it, they like to swim in real money like Scrooge McDuck!

Thanks for all the replies everyone! It seems sad they don’t include digital for things like NPD because we don’t get the true reflection of where a game charts (I know it shouldn’t matter as long as I enjoy it but I’m a geek for this kinda thing and I love seeing my favs do well haha).