Sigh!

For free you'll be able to see the top 50 games per week/month/year per region. You'll be able to see the current LTDs and first ten weeks on game pages and you'll be able to see graphs (but no numbers) on the compare games page. You'll also be able to see top 30 preorders, and top 30s on the new milestones and weekly records pages. You'll be able to view totals on the world totals page and sort by publishers / console etc.

For a standard membership, you'll be able to see the top 200 games per week/month/year as well as being able to filter by console and publisher and see top 50s filtered. On game pages you'll be able to see a full history of sales per game, you'll be able to see top 100 preorders, top 100s on the milestones and weekly records pages. You will also have access to new tools such as year on year comparisons where you can pick a date range and compare to the same period last year and the year before with fancy graphs, regional software percentages, attach rate tracking, "legs analysis" and so on.

For a premium membership you get full access to all data and a number of industry-centric tools such as revenues, publisher tracking (see how EA is doing month by month vs last year), advanced forecasting (looking ahead 3 months), full forecast models for all upcoming games, anticipation metrics, genre analysis, game metrics to analyse and quantify why games sell, hardware projection models and so on. Very specific tools aimed at investory, analysts and publishers and allowing them to better predict the future market (and decide what decisions to make in order to maximise profits for themselves or their clients).

Like I've said (a million times) standard memberships won't appeal to most people and premium memberships to even fewer, but the interest is out there and the only way to justify the creation of these tools and collection of the data necessary to power them is to charge premium rates for their use. I hope this (finally) makes sense!

It's like paying for microtransactions where the data is already there but the publisher/developer wants to charge the player more.

I'll pass.

@Words of Wisdom

The difference in your comparison is that you have to pay for the game to start with so to then pay for extras on top that are already in the game but "locked" is totally unreasonable and greedy.

In this case you aren't paying for anything to begin with but having the option to pay a small amount to access data that has a certain value that until now has been provided for free.

To compare the two is absurd. As Seece rightly says, people should be thankful that such open access to this data has been provided for free for so long.

It would be like opening store, charging nothing for every item in the store for 4 years and then people start complaining and accusing you of being greedy when you start selling half of the items for 5 cents (for items that should cost say $1 each). I don't understand this attitude that access to high-level services should be free - how do you expect companies to fund these services?

Barozi said: I heard all VGC members with over 5000 posts will get free access to all charts, numbers and new features

I think the rumour was 10,000   or contributors....