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NPD Will No Longer Publicly Provide Games Hardware Sales Data
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."
Hasn't the PS3 had lackluster sales for its entire lifespan? A serious question, rather than a disagreement with parent or an attempt to troll.
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
I don't know about the US, but in Japan their sales are picking up quite quickly. If they were going to suppress the numbers because of low sales, they would have done it a year ago. As it is, it looks more like it was either a legitimately temporary policy that came up for review or else they realize that their sales are going to start surpassing the Wii's within a year or two and they want to be the only ones that know when that happens for sure (and being able to claim it whenever they want to).
Now that they've gotten folks used to seeing a lot of info from them, they're probably hoping to start coaxing folks into paying for subscriptions in order to see the data.
Given that NPD info was being watched by an ungodly number of gaming bloggers and such, there's probably more than a few who would pay for continued access at the same level.
When in doubt, always ask, "Is there a way for them to monetize this?" Because if they can, it's probably why they're doing it.
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They're good "enough", but the problem is that their numbers are adjusted to NPD... without NPD, they'll be progressively farther until their data is meaningless.