NPD to stop publishing US sales figures
Decision applies to software and hardware.
Enjoy finding out exactly how many copies a game has sold in the US every month? Bad news then. The NPD Group, the company that tracks the data, will no longer be publishing sales figures.
Effective immediately, sales of both software and hardware will no longer appear alongside its monthly charts.
However, some data for software will still be discussed in Anita Frazier's monthly sales analysis. Platform holders and publishers who subscribe to NPD will also be permitted to release sales figures for their products if they so choose.
NPD executive director David Riley explained the move to VG247. "Clients can release their figures, which we can verify, but it shouldn't be up to NPD to release these figures."
Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter added, "I'm not sure why they ever release any of their numbers to the press. They probably do so to generate publicity, and they have likely concluded that they get plenty by publishing only a little information, so they want to give less away for free."
