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Forums - Sales - Gfk acquires Chart-Track

lombard2578 on 07 July 2008
Diomedes1976 said:
lombard2578 said:
Diomedes1976 said:
I hope Chart Track keeps revealing the sales numbers weekly.Although we dont need to dramatize ,as GFk does the same for the other countries for software and neither of them gives hardware numbers weekly.

 

Ok, so give me please the top 10 software of Spain for the week 24 and the week 22 of 2008.

If you know the exact days of that week a simple google search in spanish returns directly the GFk data.

 

Yes, i know, week 24 ended 15 june, and week 22 ended 1 june.

But, it's you which says that we easily find software gfk charts, so it's not to me to search, but it's you who must search.

If you find these two weeks, for me you are a king. So good luck.

 



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eliasg on 07 July 2008


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BKK2 on 08 July 2008

Very interesting development. This shouldn't affect UK charts as they are copyright of ELSPA, not Chart-Track. ELSPA pays Chart-Track to collate this data, and it's in ELSPA's interest to have weekly charts.

This could possibly lead to some kind of European chart at some time in the future, but GfK and Chart-Track work together on European reports already, so this probably won't change too much. The problem is each country has a different SKU, so it's not so easy to correctly combine all the different SKU's, especially for niche titles. This is what Chart-Track have said before at least.



BKK2 on 08 July 2008

From February 2007:

When did Chart Track’s push into Europe with GfK begin, and how intensive is that compared to what you’re doing in the UK?

That’s been going for quite some time now – I think the first was in ‘98/’99. At the moment, it’s an annual report. The last one we did was for ’05, and we’ll be doing the report for ’06 soon. It covered 11 European territories – the goal is always to cover the entire market, but that’s a difficult goal when there’s so many countries that make up Europe. We cover the main territories though, basically: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the UK. We produce an annual report on those territories, and it shows quite a bit of information – it takes each format in turn, and shows units and Euros for each game on PS2, PSP and so on, as well as the best sellers in each country, a breakdown of sales in each country in units and Euros.

That’s quite interesting, because it allows you to see the differences in each territory – for example, PC games have always been big in Germany, but they’ve also had a slant toward Nintendo. There’s a lot of reasons for that – one of the big ones is the ratings system, which makes it hard to sell a game like Manhunt, for example. So there’s a lot of little differences between each territory.

Are there individual companies who put together charts for those countries on a more regular basis?

Yeah – we do UK and Ireland, and now Denmark, and GfK contribute the others. It’s basically just Chart Track and GfK, and there aren’t really any others for the videogames market in Europe.

At the moment, that’s just an annual report though – at some point we’d like to up the frequency and what we really need and what we’re working toward is a common European database, with every single barcode for every product released in Europe. That would be really quite tricky to do; obviously there are a lot of different barcodes for the same product, and the same product won’t be called the same thing in different territories because they’re not all in English. So that’s the goal – to get a common database together.

That sounds like a very long term goal.

It’s not something that will happen overnight [laughs]. I actually get contacted by people from the US, who will ring up and want to know how big a title is in Europe, and I have to explain why that’s a very difficult question to answer. For some reason, they don’t realise that Europe isn’t just one country – it’s lots of different countries.


Link



BKK2 on 08 July 2008
lombard2578 said:

Bad news. When we see how it is hard to obtain gfk data, now i think it could be hard to obtain chart-track data, what was easy before.

We get weekly charts from GfK Australia similar to what we get for UK from Chart-Track, so it's not a general policy of GfK to make their charts hard to obtain. It's just that each country seems to have different policies. As Seneque pointed out, this shouldn't affect UK charts, even less so seeing that ELSPA owns the copyright.