1UP- The NPD Group's monthly games industry reports continue to be widely covered in the media, and it's easy to understand why. With game publishers hesitant to make a habit of sharing sales figures, the NPDs, as they're often called, supposedly give us somewhat of a glimpse as to which games are succeeding and which are failing. Criticisms of the NPD Group's numbers have becoming increasingly common over time, to the point where the question is now being asked whether the media ought to ignore the numbers outright.
As of right now, there are no monopolies in the games industry, and for the sake of the medium as a whole, they never should either.
And yet the biggest tech companies in America are essentially that. They buy up all the small comps only to kill them off and steal what they have, and if they can't buy em they bleed them to death.
Eventually they’ll realize the value is with the employee not the company. Buying an IP means nothing if the people who contributed are let go. They’ll get it one day.
tech is different because they buy threats and then kill them. Twitter bought Vine and did nothing with it. Despite people seemingly liking it. Could've had tiktok a decade before bytedance. go figure.
They buy IPs not talent. That's why these buyouts never work and the IPs die. Right now it's too expensive to develop games - but I expect that to shift maybe as AI tools can make it easier. The best games have been indie games for awhile as big developers fuck their ips to death with "games as a service" -
INDIE Live Expo, Japan’s premiere online digital showcase series , will debut never-before-seen games & content updates across more than 100 titles on May 25th.
"The best games of the year and the creative teams behind them were in the spotlight at the grand award ceremony of the German Computer Game Award 2024." - German Computer Game Awards.
Sure buddy... You're trying to tell me it has a deeper story than goat 🐐 simulator 4000?!?!?. I wanna give bg3 a shot but my brain is burnt out on long games
npd is basically a lake, the oceans are ww numbers.
60% of the total market...
But the real problem with npd sales are the fanboys you see on NeoGAF and vgcharts. Their egos rise and fall on this data, and most of them use it to justify or express their hatred for rival systems / companies. And hey, when the numbers don't go your way you can always hide them like they do on NeoGAF. (Even though their source receives the full numbers every single month.)
Quite simply, sales nerds aren't real gamers. In before the "but I wanna work in the industry" excuse.