Open letter to the games industry – please share your data

Dear UK Games Industry,

We have been lying to you, and we have had enough.

Last week, the No.1 game in the UK charts was not the most popular game.

The Chinese Room should have been celebrating its first No.1 with Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture. Just as this week, indie developer Mike Bithell should also have had a Top Ten game (at least) with his PC and PS4 title, Volume.

That’s not what our chart says. That is not how the history books will read. These new IPs by two British independents are missing out on the recognition they definitely deserve

The industry’s refusal to share digital data is harmful. What should be a simple process to understand what players want to buy has been ruined by amateurish guesswork.

What’s more, we have no proof to back-up our insistence that the games market is growing.

Is this right? Movies, music, books… our sister industries share their figures and their knowledge, and benefit hugely from that. Why can’t we?

Games is a competitive sector, competition is in this industry’s DNA, but we can co-operate when it matters, and this issue matters.

MCV does not want to print lies anymore. We want to tell the world about how well we are really doing and celebrate the achievements of our creators. That is what our Digital Counts campaign is all about.

Please share your data,

Yours,

The MCV Team