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NPD Will No Longer Publicly Provide Games Hardware Sales Data

Posted by Zonk on from the end-of-the-fun dept.

Newsweek's LevelUp blog has the big news of the day: the monthly releases of NPD sales information for the games industry have (for the time being) come to an end. N'Gai Croal and Geoff Keighly have a lengthy discussion about the withdrawal of that information from a reliable source. They also discuss the huge number of AAA games releasing this month, and which of those are likely to come out on top. N'Gai also notes that, as far as the NPD was concerned, we should have seen this coming. "NPD Group director David Riley contacted us with a statement to clarify his company's new position, which reads: At this time last year, it was made very clear that NPD will provide media with hardware sales figures, but that it would only be temporary. As you may recall, we never provided these numbers until Nov.'06, the first month when all three new consoles were on the market. It's been a year, so it's time to pull back. It's better to pull back and leave it up to our clients to release their numbers. Or, if manufacturers tell us it's okay to release their hardware sales numbers, then we'll go back to providing them, but that shouldn't be our call."

3 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What is NPD? by jimboinsk · · Score: 4, Informative

    The NPD Group, Inc. provides innovative market information products and services to help our clients understand their markets and optimize their businesses. We work with more than 1,400 clients - many of which are the best-known brands in the world.
    http://www.npd.com/corpServlet?nextpage=career-overview_s.html

  2. Re:Perhaps this should read... by Chibi+Merrow · · Score: 2, Informative

    I don't know about the US, but in Japan their sales are picking up quite quickly.


    They've been under 20k units/week in Japan since August. Are we talking about the same Japan?
    --
    Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
    Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
  3. Re:Summary is seriously lacking here. by DarthJohn · · Score: 2, Informative

    Before November last year they weren't giving out the numbers. When media folks were asking for the numbers for the new systems they decided to, for a limited time, make more information public for free. They have been selling the data all along, and presumably haven't been giving all of it out. The whole thing was just to answer what they thought would be a short lived higher demand due to the launching of the new gaming systems.

    Apparently they've noticed the whining from the blogs and are surprised at the outrage, but may or may not do anything about it.

    Got some updates from http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3164195