NPD and EEDAR to collaborate on new sales figures
Major US retail trackers join forces for better physical and digital numbers
NPD and EEDAR have announced that they will be collaborating exclusively on future retail reports in North America, combining data in order to provide more accurate results.
Future reports from the groups will cover both digital and physical retail, across console, online and mobile and will use both NPD's retailer point-of-sale data and EEDAR's GamePulse service.
"The NPD Group and EEDAR have always shared a common goal of providing information and insights to our clients in the games industry," said NPD president of games, David McQuillan.
"The growth of the digital channel within the games industry presents numerous challenges and opportunities that we believe are best addressed for our clients through a formalized, collaborative effort between The NPD Group and EEDAR.
"We expect that this synergy of resources and vision will result in greater transparency into the total games market including digital forms of distribution as well as the established physical format."
The proper tracking of digital sales has increasingly been a challenge for sales tracking edifices since markets began to evolve beyond physical sales. PC download service Steam has already made clear that it will not release data to any chart service, calling the idea of retail leaderboards "old fashioned".