EA Slams NPD Reports

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EA versus NPD II: Battle of the Blowhards.

"An occasional bad report from NPD, which measures a sliver of what's actually happening in gaming, gives people an erroneous impression," Gibeau tells Games Industry International. "My point is it's an irrelevant measure on the industry. It's totally irrelevant. We don't even really look at it internally anymore."
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Poor little EA. You fucking bad games aren't pulling the numbers you wanted so you blame ... the observers of the market?

Ugh. EA , please implode.
 
I hate almost everything EA does and the way the do business, but they actually have a point here. Not counting digital sales is ignoring a huge portion of game sales, especially in PC gaming. I haven't bought a single physical retail game in the last 5 years.
 
Another week , another week with EA in the news. Guess it's one way to stay relevant.
 
God will I celebrate the day EA goes bankrupt and out of business.
 
Lol @ "We don't even look at it internally anymore."

LOLWUT!? So you guys don't care about how your games are selling? You just put out games and ignore how they sell? Haha, moron.
 
NPD is irrelevant because it doesn't track digital sales. That means every single game purchased on Steam isn't tracked by NPD at all. As more and more people transition to digital purchasing, it becomes increasingly irrelevant. Let's try to look beyond the EA hate here and see what the real issue is - digital sales aren't tracked by NPD.
 
redpriest said:
NPD is irrelevant because it doesn't track digital sales. That means every single game purchased on Steam isn't tracked by NPD at all. As more and more people transition to digital purchasing, it becomes increasingly irrelevant. Let's try to look beyond the EA hate here and see what the real issue is - digital sales aren't tracked by NPD.
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Bingo.

EA is actually correct on this one. It's been known for years(and even brought up on this forum every time an article about NPD numbers gets posted). Origin, Steam, PSN, XBL, Battle.net, etc. are not counted by NPD. The NPD numbers started losing their value back in 2007, and have since then become irrelevant. Aside from sales outside of brick and mortar retail(Gamestop, Best Buy, Walmart, Target, etc.) not being tracked, digital distribution is becoming more valuable for publishers due to the extremely low distribution cost(servers still have to be hosted, but that doesn't cost as much as printing discs, cover inserts, boxes, etc. That stuff adds up to a lot of money over time). The fact that companies like Gamestop sell in-store DLC and games now over XBL and the rest should make it obvious to you all that there is a serious problem in relying on a data tracking company that ignores the fastest growing sales segment, when even Gamestop wants to get in on the action.

Yes, in general EA sucks and we all hate their management and wish they'd DIAF, yadda yadda. But at least have the decency to acknowledge the rare occasions that they're actually completely correct about something that impacts the entire industry.
 
NPD only tracks new game retail sales in the US. It's useless for everything else. No DLC, no used sales, no social network game tracking, and not one digital download service.
 
I agree with EA, NPD needs to expand and improve its product tracking on games. If I were them I wouldn't look at them either since a HUGE chunk of your profit won't even be tracked by them.
 
Trimlock said:
I agree with EA, NPD needs to expand and improve its product tracking on games. If I were them I wouldn't look at them either since a HUGE chunk of your profit won't even be tracked by them.
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Well I wouldn't say to ignore it since it at least counts retail(and that's still 2/3 of their revenue), but when the benefit of publishers getting this data is to get info about the competition(does competitor XYZ make 30 or 50 percent of their profit via a particular sales channel, is competitor abc growing in a particular sales channel), the data that NPD provides becomes significantly less valuable as a representation of sales.

Of course NPD has it's own issues to consider. Not all game publishers are publicly traded companies and as such do not have to, or flat out refuse to publish reports. Look at Valve with Steam. It's estimated that Valve's annual revenue with mostly Steam is somewhere around 600-800 million dollars(and I've seen as high as 1 billion). Yes, it's still smaller than EA's quarter 1.5 billion dollar numbers, but it's a lot of money. With no way to track their sales, other companies can only guess what Valve's revenue and profits are, along with their growth(it's also an obvious perk to stay a privately owned company) and makes it harder for companies like Square-Enix, Eidos, EA, Activision, etc. to judge trends and what they themselves should focus on for future profitability.

Even ignoring a digital distribution powerhouse like Valve, NPD also can't really track independent game sales. Indie games may not seem like much, but when you consider something like Minecraft and the revenue that Mojang has managed to pull in, big publishers like EA, Activision, etc. want to know just what it is that consumers are willing to buy.
 
Tacking digital sales will help improve the image of PC gaming greatly.
No longer can devs site poor "retail" sales for a lackluster PC version of their games.
 
stop!theradio said:
Lol @ "We don't even look at it internally anymore."

LOLWUT!? So you guys don't care about how your games are selling? You just put out games and ignore how they sell? Haha, moron.
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Pretty sure EA doesn't need some 3rd party to tell them how their own games are selling.
 
WorldExclusive said:
Tacking digital sales will help improve the image of PC gaming greatly.
No longer can devs site poor "retail" sales for a lackluster PC version of their games.
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When their delivery system is part malware that just adds insult to injury.
Nintendo got it halfway right with the eshop, Steam only leaves me in awe with whats available anywhere.
tl;dr i'll shell out money from my student budget if the product is good. (see Skyrim, Tribes, Oot)
 
NPD is a console gaming popularity contest.
 
Ea is close to correct this time. NPD numbers track only retail stores sales, and not even all of those. While not totally useless, they hardley mean as much as NPD pretends they do.
 
We don't even really look at it internally anymore.
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then why are you bothering to say anything or even acknowledge it publicly EA?
i mean, yeah... useless numbers are useless, but making a big stink about it is equally useless.
 
You know what that means, EA is preparing to launch it's own sales monitoring service because NPD's is too restrictive.
 
harbingerofdoom said:
then why are you bothering to say anything or even acknowledge it publicly EA?
i mean, yeah... useless numbers are useless, but making a big stink about it is equally useless.
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They are talking about it because you people are making a big deal about it and they need to correct the misinformation.... is this kind of thing so hard?
 
travbrad said:
I hate almost everything EA does and the way the do business, but they actually have a point here. Not counting digital sales is ignoring a huge portion of game sales, especially in PC gaming. I haven't bought a single physical retail game in the last 5 years.
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I actually prefer buying physical copies of games, but have you tried doing that lately? Unless you want another copy of Sims 3 or World of Warcraft, you're not going to find what you're looking for in a video game store when it comes to PC games.

Gee, why aren't PC games selling physically? Because you can't find the damn things. Why don't we track physical copies being sold of iOS or Android games? That's easy: 0.
 
EA, a mostly -CONSOLE- oriented business, is mad over the NDP reflecting that they have poor retail sales

Sounds like to me "Working as intended" considering EA tries to be a console business first and foremost, them trying to use Origin and PC as a scapegoat is frankly, bullshit
 
The funny thing here isn't that EA is right about NPD. It's that EA is only saying this now that they have Origin up and running. Valve has never released its sales numbers -- not sure about the other digital sales platforms -- so this thing about NPD has been true for YEARS. Yet Valve doesn't seem to care: they're making money, and they're not publically held.

NPD has been a joke for a long time when it comes to PC sales.
 
David McQuillan, president of NPD Games, is "surprised" by Gibeau's comments for a few reasons, provided in a statement to Joystiq. The first: "While we will not comment on the specifics on our long-standing relationship with EA, we can say with confidence that we have daily dealings with all of our major publisher clients. And we know for a fact they're using the data."

The second reason McQuillan cites is the continued prevalence of physical sales, making up 56 percent of industry sales in 2011. "The current games industry is still largely rooted in retail and any industry player involved with AAA content simply can't take their eye away from the retail environment," he writes.

NPD Group's David Riley adds, "We do cover digital. Granted, it's not near the level of granularity that we provide via physical point of sale, but physical POS is still huge and needs to be taken seriously. In my opinion, you do a disservice to our industry when you dismiss the value of retail sales research."
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What kind of relationship with EA do they have, that the guy who deals with the developers (and probably the guy with the whip when they aren't churning out Madden, Tiger Woods, NBA, NFL, and NHL annually) bad mouths NDP?

And who the hell is using inaccurate data, that doesn't show the digital sales of any of the major providers like STEAM, Origin, even Sony is into the digital download marketplace, is this why Gamestop is now selling STEAM vouchers and pushing their digital download stuff, because the data showing store sales is crap?

I try and buy physical copies of my PC games, but when the stores aren't supplying what I want, what choice do I have besides digital download, or Amazon?
 
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