{"id":203,"date":"2005-08-08T13:12:00","date_gmt":"2005-08-08T17:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=203"},"modified":"2006-08-18T22:06:38","modified_gmt":"2006-08-19T02:06:38","slug":"secret-sales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2005\/08\/08\/secret-sales\/","title":{"rendered":"Secret Sales"},"content":{"rendered":"

Grumpy Gamer Ron Gilbert has a beef to pick<\/a> with NPD. Why are sales figures for games kept a secret from the public or the small developer? You’ll occasionally see a list of the top ten games of the week, or the month or the year but rarely with numbers attached. And there is never much of a clue whether these sales are typical or not. There is never much historical perspective beyond “PC Games are down. PS2 Games are up.”<\/p>\n

Can anyone out there tell me how Age of Mythology<\/i> did compared to Age of Kings<\/i>? If you have a few grand to spend on this type of data, you’re probably also not allowed to tell me. Was Psychonauts<\/i> a total failure? Where did it fail more? Are sales going up based on word of mouth? Think of all the interesting industry\/audience analysis stuff that could be written about or discussed if gamers and bloggers and even tiny freelancers like me had access to sales data.<\/p>\n

Gilbert’s point is developer focused. How will indie developers know what sells unless someone tells them? Marketers and publishers might have a different definition of “flop” than a developer does. He notes that box office figures are public knowledge. Box Office Mojo<\/a> has a lot of the historic data for how well movies do at the box office. Games are different. Point of sale info is controlled by one company – a company that doesn’t count many online sales, and so may have limited reliability in any case. (It doesn’t count MMO subscriptions, either.)<\/p>\n

There may be good business reasons for keeping this information closed off, but I doubt that there are many trade secrets involed in reporting how many copies of Cossacks II<\/i> were sold in the US.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Grumpy Gamer Ron Gilbert has a beef to pick with NPD. Why are sales figures for games kept a secret from the public or the small developer? You’ll occasionally see a list of the top ten games of the week, or the month or the year but rarely with numbers attached. And there is never […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-3h","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}