GamesIndustry had a big article about reporting on digital data: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...s-industry-still-struggling-with-digital-data
Highlights:
Highlights:
- They interviewed SuperData's Joost van Dreunen, NPD's Mat Piscatella, and Epic/SteamSpy's Sergey Galyonkin. The below summary is of the NPD parts, since I think most of us know about SteamSpy, and SuperData gets their data from payment processors instead of publishers.
- Many publishers actually didn't have a good way to track this data effectively and accurately in real time, in a way that was conducive to NPD reporting (think more like regions and timeframe of the data than being able to get the data in the first place).
- Digital sales were very low for an incredibly long time, so it wasn't until recently that publishers felt they should even be caring about this data enough to invest in tools to track it.
- Even if they did want to track it, some smaller publishers didn't have enough staff to actually go and build the tools to track this data effectively versus having them work on more important tasks.
- Some publishers also were worried about sharing their data because they didn't want other publishers to know where they were being successful. For example, say you were selling 3 million copies of a PC strategy series on Steam that had no direct competitors, but no one had paid attention thus far. You probably wouldn't want anyone else to realize how much money was being made and actually try to make a competing product.
- Publishers and developers care about this data much more these days due to the huge digital sales percentage of the current games industry, so NPD is having an easier time when trying to get this data, though there are still barriers. NPD thinks these barriers can definitely be overcome, and that the value of this data is becoming much more clear to publishers.
- In case people haven't noticed thus far, we do actually get digital data in NPD reports now for most major publishers.