NPD Group Justifies Dropping Sales Numbers from Monthly Report

The NPD Group, a market research firm which tracks hardware and video games sales for the United States market, has talked about its decision to limit the actual sales figures that it is offering in its monthly reports, which some have criticized as making the public less aware of the trends and tendencies in the video game market.

Anita Frazier, who is an analyst for the NPD Group and offers commentary on the monthly analysis, has stated in a blog post that, “We’ve long acknowledged that our reporting of monthly point-of-sale purchases (covering new physical sales of hardware, software and accessories only, not used game sales) did not represent 100 percent of the consumer spend on the industry.”

She then added that, “Since new physical sales at retail have been down for some months now, the news that the industry is beleaguered has been widely covered, and it has caused unnecessary angst for many.”

To show the way digital distribution and used and rental revenue compared with retail sales linked to new games the NPD Group says that for the first six months of 2010 the first has sales between 2.6 and 2.9 billion dollars compared to about 3.7 billion for the second.

To clearly see the way the NPD has changed its monthly data reports see the two articles on the hardware and video game charts for August and compare them to those for September, released during last week.

Overall this year the figures coming from the NPD Group have shown an industry in decline, with little hope of getting back to the sales peaks registered in 2008.

Hardware revenue has declined even as actual unit sales have gone up because of the price cuts that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo have operated.

In the video game space the music simulation sector has lost a lot of sales but traditional blockbusters like Madden NFL, FIFA and Halo: Reach are still performing well.