Valve on poorly reported NPD Group stats
Category: PC, Posted: 03/06/2008 at 07:49PM CST by Billy Wang, Previews Editor
Video game sales usually only come from two places: the publishers themselves or The NPD Group. Doug Lombardi, vice president of marketing, Valve, made some comments (again) on Gamasutra regarding the state of PC gaming and partly shifted the fear and anxiety on The NPD Group.
Regarding the monthly PC gaming sales reports released by The NPD Group, Lombardi stated, "That totally ignores the money changing hands, and properties like World of Warcraft with their monthly subscriptions.
That totally ignores Steam sales, and any other MMOs and online distribution systems and a host of others... it also ignores things like PopCap games. Peggle's not in that number."
He went on saying that if those figures were counted within the NPD's numbers, PC gaming sales would appear to be the fastest growing over the past few years, "If you took Steam, Peggle, PopCap, WoW and mixed it with NPD numbers, the world looks a lot different. All of a sudden, it looks like PC's probably the biggest one, and year over year, the fastest-growing."
Jason Holtman, business development director, Valve, mentioned that since Steam distributes worldwide, the NPD's numbers would seem smaller since they only count North American numbers, "Our view of where PC gaming is across the world is very different than someone looking at North America's numbers."
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These misgivings about the NPD calculation methods have been going on almost as long as the NPD has been doing it in the first place.
You'd think they'd have this figured out by now...
They, meaning NPD, of course.
It's just like Nielsen ratings on TV. The same kinds of errata and small sample sizes and completely ignored figures have had networks complaining about that rating system for years. This doesn't seem much different.