I've noticed recently that many people (not to mention more than a few websites) are using the NPD group's sales data as somehow being representative of the (according to them, dire) state of the PC gaming industry. I've never noticed a thread on the matter, so I would like to raise a few points.
They only cover US sales
PC gaming is not huge in America. The UK alone sees around one third as many PC game sales as the US. Germany sees equal tomore sales. America accounts for barely than one third of the total global sales (this is an estimate on my part, but it seems about right) of many PC games. Obviously it varies from game to game, but generally speaking, the US does not see strong sales compared with the rest of the world. Sales in America don't represent sales on a global scale.
They only cover boxed retail sales
The NPD group's figures don't cover online sales, which include monthly subscriptions to MMORPGs, digital distrubtion and microtransactions. Considering that Steam has over fifteen million registered users worldwide, one MMORPG alone has over ten million subscribers, and many developers are looking at episodic, digitally distributed games (Telltale, Hothead), this is clearly a fairly significant issue. There are also services like gameTap and Direct2Drive.
Many other companies have their own DD services, or are in the process of setting them up, and both id and DICE/EA (and it's fair to presume as yet unannounced others) are soon releasing free games supported entirely by advertising and microtransactions.
Fudged numbers
From what I can tell, the NPD group's numbers run from January to December of the same year. Now, as we all know, many games are released toward the end of the year. The NPD doesn't seem to factor in the most basic and obvious concept - games released late in the year don't have time enough to sell into the big numbers to get on the NPD's top selling charts. These games released towards the end of the year see most of their sales the year after, but are not counted on the yearly charts because they were released the previous year.
For instance, Crysis sold one million units worldwide between Novemer '07 and the end of January '08. The NPD records it as selling 85,000 by the end of 2007. Not only does this only factor in US sales (and only boxed copies at that), the game won't be carried over to the top selling 2008 list, simply because it was released in 2007. Crysis conveniently misses the 2007 top selling list and the 2008 top selling list, despite having currently sold over 1.5 million worldwide in barely nine months. And yet Crysis will never be recorded by the NPD as selling more than 85,000 units (in its yearly top sellers charts).
Please, if you're going to quote the NPD's figures, be aware of the above points. PC gaming is far, far stronger than the NPD would have you think with their inaccurate and incomplete numbers.
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