NPD finally launches digital tracking to address "long-standing need"

It's been more than five years since The NPD Group said it would start including digital data in its monthly reports on the US video game business. In those five years, not only has digital grown, but publishers, analysts, press and more have all thrown shade at NPD, questioning the relevancy of a service that only offers physical sales data in an increasingly digital era. Today, NPD is finally taking that first step to offer a more complete picture of the entire games market as it's unveiled its digital point-of-sale (POS) sourced service, tracking SKU-level sales data on digital games.

"Following several years of beta testing, the Digital Games Tracking Service will allow participating clients to understand the size and growth of the digital market, and analyze attach rates and other important metrics. Combined with physical data available by NPD, these clients can gain a better understanding of the interplay between the physical and digital sales channels," the firm explained in a press statement.

"As has been experienced across a wide variety of industries, digital has made a big impact on the overall gaming market, and we've risen to meet the demand for a reporting mechanism that tracks those sales in a timely and accurate way," said Joanne Hageman, President, U.S. Toys & Games, The NPD Group. "With the participation and support of leading publishers - whose cooperation makes this possible - we are excited to launch an industry-first service that addresses a long-standing need."

"We recognize that there's still a ways to go, we want more publishers to join, we want to be able to project for people who are not participating"

Liam Callahan

The usual report on physical sales data will now be combined with digital sales data and issued on July 21 instead of July 14; it's expected to follow that cadence (the third data Thursday of the month) moving forward. Initially, NPD has gained the support of major publishers like EA, Activision, Ubisoft, Capcom, Square Enix, Take-Two, Deep Silver and Warner Bros. There are notable exceptions, however, like Bethesda as well as first-party publishers like Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, but NPD analyst Liam Callahan promised that more publishers would be signing on as the service evolves.

"This has been several years of beta testing and we've been doing this in partnership with publishers, shaping the product, encoding the data the way the industry wants to see it. It's really at the behest of or on the behalf of the publishers that we're moving forward with this announcement... Really the goal is to bring a new level of transparency never before seen, at least in the US market. This is really the first step. We recognize that there's still a ways to go, we want more publishers to join, we want to be able to project for people who are not participating. It's an evolution, it's something that takes time and our philosophy was really to start - if we waited to have every publisher in the world to sign up it would take forever. We'll be improving this as time goes on," he said.

Importantly, NPD will notate next to game titles on the chart that do not include digital data. Callahan wants the service, which is being produced with the assistance of EEDAR, to ultimately be able to project data even for non-participants but NPD isn't starting with that ability just yet. Instead, it'll focus on tracking revenue from full-game downloads across Xbox Live, PlayStation Network and Steam. Services like Battle.net and Uplay won't be included at this point.

"EEDAR is excited to be part of this initiative with NPD and the participating publishers. Tracked digital revenues have seen annual growth of over 100% each year since 2012. In 2016, we've already tracked more digital revenue than we saw in 2012 and 2013 combined. This initiative is a great milestone for the industry which will allow publishers to make better business decisions with a broader data set," added EEDAR CEO Rob Liguori.

Add-on content like DLC and microtransactions will be tracked as well, but that data will only be released to participants, not the media and public. "We're waiting until that's a little more fully baked for us to roll that out to the media. We're doing things in stages," Callahan said.

It may be frustrating for the media to not have a granular breakdown at the SKU level to see what portion of a game's sales are digital versus physical, but NPD anticipates more openness as the service evolves.

"We've just opened the gates right now. Just as you've seen a withdrawal [of data] on the physical side - we used to give units - this is sort of going to be the reverse I'm hoping and we can provide more over time"

David Riley

NPD communications chief David Riley commented, "This is a closed service, the detailed data is only available to participants so if you're a non-participating publisher you cannot see the data. The fact that we're allowed to go out with something for the media is a huge step in the right direction. I think as the service matures and as the publishers get used to it and we get more on board, we have more history, we do some benchmarking, we can provide that, but what we wanted to do for multiple reasons, including appeasing the publishers was to combine full-game physical with full-game digital, keep away from the DLC, keep PC games separate because that's a whole different ball of wax. It's not comprehensive, but it's the most comprehensive, we're the first in the market to track this and we're very cautious."

He added, "I expect a good old slamming from the industry press because of the limitations here but what we don't want to do is open ourselves up by separating it at this time. We've just opened the gates right now. Just as you've seen a withdrawal [of data] on the physical side - we used to give units - I'm hoping we can provide more over time."

Working with the publishers is great, but there are numerous digitally released titles from indies which make up a growing piece of the industry pie. Will the service grow to track those titles too? "Indies are a big part of the industry in terms of their innovation and I think when I talk about our projection methodology and assets at NPD, that is part of how we can track everything, not just for publishers, including indie games and everything that's outside the panel right now," Callahan said.

"Some of those smaller games are published through a publisher or first-party so there are ways to get some of those with our publisher-sourced methodology, and otherwise we're approaching it with developing a robust projection methodology. That's certainly part of our plan, we're not going to ignore the indie piece."

In our previous conversations with NPD, the firm had hinted at possibly working towards the goal of global digital reports. That's not off the table, but it's not a focus at the moment. "US is our core competency... our vision is to expand this as much as we can in a way that makes sense for our partners. If that's global that may be what we pursue. But we also want to do the best job that we can in projecting for the market and recruiting as many publishers as we can," Callahan concluded.