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I believe the NPD may be talking about VGChartz.
For a while VGChartz has been offering a series of articles that track WiiWare and VC sales, they are pretty accurate, Matt Casamassina stated on a podcast: “What I’ve been told by most developers of Wiiware, if you go to VGChartz, and look at the numbers they have, they are pretty close to the real thing.”. They obtain the numbers by extracting info from the Nintendo Channel. The methodology is explained here.
And for a longer period articles about Xbox Live Arcade sales. I don’t much about these, since I’m not really interested in the Xbox. There are no numbers for the PlayStation Store, because there is no way to get info about the games on it.
Even if this is case, I think the NPD is making a mistake, because who will buy these charts for digital distribution? The companies that own the digital distribution stores? No, because they will always know how many games are being sold. The publishers that put their games on these stores? No, they can get the info from the store owners, if they want to.
So I see this as a worthless move, that will not bring NPD any money.
You could be right. I wish there were more competitors to video game sales than just NPD. Japan has several companies that track data and release it publicly. Strange how America is stuck with just NPD.
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