Without the tools to track success... accurately

The videogames industry has been a great success in the past few years - alright, a bit less so than we'd have liked in the last two, but there's no denying in any quarter now that games have arrived and are regularly trumping other forms of entertainment in the popularity stakes.

How do we know? Because companies release financial results, which sometimes detail the number of hardware or software units they sell, and because we've always got the Western market standard that is the monthly NPD results to give us a detailed overview.

Except, from now on we're not going to have that Western market standard, as NPD has decided to remove hardware and software unit sales from its monthly reports released to the media.

If one were looking for reasons why, there are two obvious paths to choose. Firstly that NPD believes the information it's been giving away for free each month is actually rather valuable, and more money can be made by forcing companies to pay for it instead. Which is fair, and makes business sense.

Or, if one were being a terrible cynic, you might surmise it's the result of complaints from companies that feel less than stellar sales in the past year have painted too negative a picture for their respective share prices, and they'd rather not have than information made public any more - unless it's at their terms.

It's a shame, frankly, because while such detailed reports really are hugely useful for us, the media, in trying to work out exactly how the markets are faring - and so accurate and consistent reporting will become scarce from here on in - it's not just numbers that can suffer.

Information, as we all know, is powerful, and control of information is even better. It's always been interesting to watch the platform holders' press releases after the release of NPD information, for how they're choosing to spin the results.

For a while Microsoft would always focus on the attach rate, because that was its easiest win (being on the market for longer than Sony) and boast its third party sales record. Sony on the other hand would occasionally trumpet platform-exclusive software sales, or hardware unit numbers in good months. Nintendo would simply point out its continuing dominance on pretty much any metric you'd care to measure.

Obviously the nature of the market has changed over time, and so has the spin - but with the cold truth of numbers, it was possible to look past the press releases and paint a more accurate, bigger picture. We'll see what happens from now on, but clearly, it stands to reason that publishers and platform holders alike probably won't divulge anything that's not going to look good - and as we head into what's become an absolutely crucial business period for the industry as a whole, the NPD move looks about as defensive and opaque as an industry could possibly be.

One of the strongest arguments companies will have, when complaining about the release of NPD monthly unit sales, is that it genuinely doesn't present the full picture - because it only represents packaged goods sales, not digital downloads, making it less and less accurate as an overall market picture.

You could argue in return, however, that data on the digital market could already be made available on an individual company basis should they choose to. Do they choose to? Only when it's a good news story - so will they choose to release packaged goods unit data in future? Only when it's a good news story.

The big question is, will this smoke and mirrors act help the industry, and that's difficult to work out. It might have some upside for some companies that feel harshly judged on what were previously the only reliable metrics available. Were some metrics better than none at all? We'll find out soon enough - because now the last Western standard in accurately measuring market activity has disappeared, and we're all in the dark.