NPD’s Liam Callahan announced during a press release that the group, which tracks game sales on Xbox One and other consoles in the US, will start including digital sales soon. For years, NPD has remained a good metric for how well a certain game or console was doing in the US market, however with the advent of digital sales growing ever more popular, the sales reports haven’t been realistically representing game sales.
“This has been several years of beta testing and we’ve been doing this in partnership with publishers, shaping the product, encoding the data the way the industry wants to see it. It’s really at the behest of or on the behalf of the publishers that we’re moving forward with this announcement… Really the goal is to bring a new level of transparency never before seen, at least in the US market. This is really the first step. We recognize that there’s still ways to go, we want more publishers to join, we want to be able to project for people who are not participating. It’s an evolution, it’s something that takes time and our philosophy was real to start – if we waited to have every publisher in the world to sign up it would take forever. We’ll be improving this as time goes on.”
However, this isn’t all sunshine and roses. The program is opt-in at the moment and publishers like Bethesda and Microsoft haven’t been included in the list of companies being tracked, so it remains to be seen if these companies will join. At the moment companies like Activision and Capcom joined the program, so we might be able to see how well games like Call of Duty is doing in the US.
Digital sales have been growing extremely fast, with Microsoft announcing that Halo 5 broke the record for the best-selling digital game of all time on Xbox Live when it launched in October 2015. With NPD embracing these sales in their reports, they might become relevant again, as we move to a future where all games are sold digitally.
Source: TechnoBuffalo
Dreyer was a regular ICXM contributor between 2016–2017, publishing 139 articles across opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative. They post on X as @dreyer_smit.