Valve Will Not Offer Data for Digital Sales Chart

Video game developer and Steam creator Valve seems to not be interested in the creation of a comprehensive digital video game sales chart and says that one would in no way benefit the industry and might lead to developers getting the wrong idea about the state of the market.

Jason Holtman, who is the director of business development at Valve, spoke about the digital sales chart concept with the United Kingdom based MCV, saying, “The idea of a chart is old. It came from people trying to aggregate disaggregated information. What we provide to partners is much more rapid and perfected information.”

He added, “If you look back at the way retail charts have been made they have been proven to be telling an inaccurate story. They apparently had shown how the PC format was dying when it was actually thriving.”

Developers who work with Steam are able to see sales data for their games that are accurate within the hour, but this data will not be made public and the Valve representative even believes that there's no need for a publisher or a developer to know exactly how well a competitor is doing.

A team needs to focus on its own work and evaluate its performance when compared to expectations rather than watching how two different products that could be destined for different audiences are doing in a head-to-head contest.

In the United States, the NPD Group delivers monthly sales data for both the hardware and the software sector, but the company has also scaled back the amount of information that it makes public.

The NPD Group has also said that it will make an effort to include the sales generated by digital distribution services in its data in order to provide a much clearer picture of the video games market.