NPD to begin tracking digital sales data this year

The NPD Group has announced it will start officially tracking worldwide digital sales of video games.

Speaking with Games Industry, organization president David McQuillan admitted that the move to cover the digital arm of the market has been a long time coming and explained how NPD plans to pull off mapping the seemingly amorphous section of the industry.

We fully realize that the market needs the same level of information for the digital categories as exists for the physical business today: SKU-level POS,” McQuillan said.

The progress on that effort up until recently has been slow and frustrating at times, but today I am very happy to share that the pace of progress has changed recently.

NPD has formed a leader panel to track digital POS sales of full game and add-on content downloads. Full market transparency, including digital is incredibly important to the health of the industry.”

The panel has thus far brought together nine ‘leading’ publishers to focus on full-game downloads and DLC for consoles, mobile devices and PC.

McQuillan also revealed that NPD has partnered with EEDAR to track digital purchases worldwide – instead of only in North America as the general public is currently subjected to in its monthly retail reports. He adds that the results of the digital findings should eventually make their way into those reports, though it’s anyone’s guess when and how much of the info collected will be made publicly available.

"Once we move past the beta or proof of concept phase, subscribers will have access to the full data set, which you would expect of any service. The level of information to be shared publicly has not been determined at this time."